I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are welcoming in the new year! Here's a little update on the state of my projects.
I worked a lot of overtime at my day job this month so I wasn't able to completely re-write Reindeer Rearing like I had hoped, but I was able to greatly reduce the ram usage by cutting out a largely redundant system I was using to handle sprites. I was able to touch on all of the mini games at least a little under the hood to make them better self contained and more reliable. I haven't experienced any crashes through testing but if you find any bugs don't be afraid to message me! Lastly I re worked how the toy builder mini game handles the different toys. What was before 7 textures and a data file has been reduced to a single texture! This isn't a texture sheet either, to add new toys is as simple as drawing their finished sprite. The game will automatically split this sprite into 3 pieces and color it black when it's loaded. The sprites are currently all hard-coded but in the future I'd like to support user files to add to a sprite list.
Now that the holiday season is wrapping up I look forward to the next item on my list, Project Gothic. Gothic is still the most viewed/downloaded game on my itch and it desperately deserves to be re-worked into a more functional and finished project. I have no time frame on when I plan to move updates for Gothic, except that I will be converting the project over to a Gradle project tomorrow and I'll start whittling away at it after that. Gothic is the focus until I deem it in a polished state!
While Gothic is my #1 focus I find I tend to work better if I have a side project going for when I hit roadblocks. The side project while I work on Gothic is going to be Slime Venture! I fully intend to polish Slime Venture into a finished project now that the Jam is over. It was well received and I believe has a very firm framework that held up very well during the short period I put it together. It won't be my primary focus for the next couple of months but I will be revisiting the level generation and menus to make it a better game in my spare time. I will also be making some finished assets for it to practice with Blender animations and prep for more detailed work that Gothic will require.
I wish you the happiest new year!
