It’s been about a month since the last update log, hasn’t it? Going by my bi-weekly schedule, I should have written this one on the 8th, but ended up not doing so because I just didn’t have anything worthwhile to report other than “the album is still in progress and it’s the only thing I’ve been (not) working on in the past two weeks”.
At this point I’m just writing this log both for self-accountability and to give at least some sign of life.
So yes, elephant in the room. The album. Going by my progress spreadsheet, we’re currently looking at an 86.5% completion rate, but it hasn’t really been going up in a while. I’ve only got one track left to write, and it’s been giving me a headache because I’ve yet to stumble upon instrumentation for it that I actually like.
It’s also looking increasingly unlikely that I’ll meet the “by the end of February” deadline at this rate. Hopefully I’ll only miss it narrowly so that I can still capitalize on the upcoming Bandcamp Friday on the first Friday of March, but I’d keep expectations of that low. If you’ve been keeping track for a while, you’ll know that I almost never meet any deadline I set for myself, so for now I’ll just stick with saying “it’ll be done when it’s done, whether that be in five days or five weeks”.
That said, I guess I do call it a “general” update log for a reason, so maybe I could pad it out a bit with some journaling unrelated to personal projects.
As some of you may have witnessed, I finally managed to Lunatic-1cc IN last Thursday. When I uploaded it to YouTube, I realized I should also upload some of my other Touhou achievements from years past. They’re as follows:
You can also check my playlist of other Touhou Lunatic 1ccs. Counting the 1ccs I don’t have footage of – and not counting the fighting games – I’ve now got Lunatic 1ccs in half the official Touhou games. Not sure which game I’ll tackle next yet, but it might be either SA, DDC, or WBaWC.
Today I also came upon notes for a game idea I remember having since I was a kid. I remember drawing a lot of mockup screenshots for it, though while those are all completely lost to time, what remains are notes I made from what memories I retained.
Basically, it’d be a 2D Metroidvania kind of like Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap and Wonder Boy in Monster World – or, for a more recent example, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom. One of the recurring elements also seems to be crystals, with one mechanic revolving around collecting crystal shards scattered across the world in order to craft them into various things, such as powerful equipment or an item that doubles how long your life bar can get
I’d love to make it a reality someday, but at present it’s barely even more than the fragment of a concept. I gotta fill in a lot of the lore and worldbuilding, to say nothing of the graphics and sound that’d have to be made. It’s definitely not something I could pump out in just a few weeks. To top it all off, I’m actually really bad at programming platformers.
Ah well, if I can at least flesh out the concept some, that’ll be enough for me. I’m only one guy, after all, and even just bringing out a new Mukai title takes a lot out of me… as evidenced by the fact that there’s still only the one.
Speaking of projects, though, I also want to update my Sokoban clone at some point, port it over to GMS2 and give it some quality of life adjustments, among other things. Like a proper pause menu instead of having to hold down Esc for 3 seconds. Maybe even a function to undo steps, though I feel like there should be some kind of penalty to it, like having it stop recording your number of steps and pushes for the level you’re in.
What I’m also thinking of adding is more cutscenes, especially to the text-only screens. A proper how-to-play section would be great to have, too, even if I doubt anyone’s actually gonna look at it.
Speaking of clones, there’s also this Columns clone that I’d been working on, but all I’ve got so far is a custom sprite font and some rough shapes for the jewels. Meh, probably no point in going into too much detail about my plans for that yet, either.
…Anyway, yeah. Lot of stuff I want to do. Nowhere near enough mental capacity for all of it. I hope you can be patient with me for at least a little longer. I’m trying my best… I think. Who can say, really?
On that note, though, this is going to be a bitch to translate into Japanese later.
Gensakudan Blog ― 懐古世紀日誌 