Weekly Blog 5/17/23

A late blog, partly got too busy over the weekend, partly forgot until now. Gonna make this a quick one just as a holdover until weekend where I'll go into more detail on things if needed.

Videos and Stream

The good news is that I've finally got a chance to record Pokemon XG over the past couple weeks. The bad news is that on top of the usual technical issues of OBS and Dolphin hating each other more than Romeo and Julliet's parents, I screwed up the audio for two videos in a row in that mess and chaos. Which sucks because I really enjoyed the commentary for that episode, but I might be able to savage it by rerecording that episode and just save the good part as a bonus episode or something. Then out of frustration, I decided to just record the commentary for the next episode right into OBS, only to realize that I didn't have the commentary synched properly after I did the recording. So far in editing it doesn't seem like the desynch is major enough to ruin the episode, so I might be able to get away without rerecording that one as well. At least I think the commentary is nice enough for that one as well that I really don't want to rerecord it unless it really results in something like a noticeably delayed reaction or so. So I'm not a happy camper about all that, but I did finally get back into streaming after a hiatus of over a month so that was good. Even got an idea for my next stream series, but it's been awhile since I've done this type of stream so I'd like to test out things to make sure it works before promising anything.

Game Projects

Dawn of Djinn continues to go well. I'm getting so far into it I decided to start working on the "causal" version.

Basically, I decided to handle the multiple difficulties of Dawn of Djinn differently than I did in V1. The whole key system was a nice fill in and has it's fans but with V2 I'm shooting for a more "polished" mod for lack of better way to describe it. So I'm planning on dividing the different difficulties between different patches so I can better polish the experience depending on the type of person playing. With V2 I'm trying to get away from the "hard mod" label Dawn of Djinn got known as in V1 in exchange for an experience that can be enjoyed by Golden Sun fan of all skill levels, as well as RPG fans looking to try something new. There will still be just as much challenge as there was in V1, but just with another option I can share with my more casual Golden Sun fans.

To do this, Dawn of Djinn will come with multiple patches you can pick between. A "normal"/"challenge" patch that'll have challenge on a similar level to Version 1; and a "casual" patch that'll play more similarly to vanilla Golden Sun but with the new features such as Djinn Charms, enemies new to Dawn of Djinn, and of course all of the QoL changes such as the new versions of overworld Psynergy. I'm also considering a "Kazo"/"Brutal" version, but I'm not going to worry about that until the basic patch for Dawn of Djinn is all done.

Main reason I bring all this up was because I started a thread on my Discord page to get feedback from fans regarding this new system. Specifically I think there's room to still implement items similar to the brutal and causal key of version 1, though I'm curious what people's preference are with how they should be implemented into version 2. So check out my Discord for share your thoughts on that.

https://discord.gg/MJuxQp7H

I don't think I'm going to include them in the base patch since I want to preserve the integrity of the challenge, but they might work in casual mode. I mostly want to know if players prefer starting with them (tossing them if they don't want them) or just manually buying them from a shop like how it worked in V1. But if you have other thoughts regarding Dawn of Djinn feel free to share them as well. And if you don't have Discord, feel free to either reply to this blog or through whatever other means you normally reach out to me with.

At the rate I'm going, I probably won't have Dawn of Djinn V2 done by the end of the year, but hopefully I'll have something I can share at least with the Discord community. Still trying to be more subtly about sharing too many of these sorts of projects publicly but I'd like to share something eventually.