Sooooo, both me and Shady Two spent most of last week being sick. I don't know if it was Covid again or something else, but it was not pleasant, and it mostly prevented us from doing any work. That is not to say that nothing was done.

I decided to finally sit down and start coding and rough designing what the in-game journal would look like. It was so good and clear in my head, but when I started doing mock-ups in-game, it just felt that something was missing, or something was wrong. Nonetheless, after a few hours of coding, testing triggers, moving placeholders on the screen, and trying to fill the journal I decided that this was as far as I could go in my current state, and did what I do best - made a screenshot of what I had cooked up and showed it to Shady Two (who was starting to feel better by that point) and let the finalization of the design and beautification be her trouble.

And wouldn't you know, she quickly whipped up something that looked and fit on the screen way better than what I was struggling with. Granted she didn't start from scratch like I did, and the UI is still far from being finished, but at least I am now much more optimistic about the end result.

I now need to really get into working on actually filling that journal. Because none of the notes that I wrote up until now don't really do it for me. The journal turned out to be much more difficult to write for, because it sits in this strange position of being not really the narrator, not really the MC's thoughts, and even a little bit of the fourth wall breaking player's notebook. I really need to find that sweet spot for writing the entries there. Or maybe I will just flail around for a bit, and just settle on some middle ground... Eh. Who knows.

I cannot promise that the journal will be finished by the next update, but that's surely something that I am hoping for. We'll see.

One the other things that happened, I wrote another random event, this time for the Practice Spells activity, since it has been noticeably lacking those. But when I went in to test it, I found that with the amount of random events in the game now, they started popping up a bit too randomly for my taste, so I went in and tried to tweak the triggers a bit to add a little bit system to the chaos. That was the plan all along, but I really thought that I wouldn't need to do this until we had at least a dozen more events in game. I will probably keep tweaking this as I go from now on, and see it the events are feeling better now.

Well, I guess that's it for this blog. I don't really have any worthwhile WIPs to show you today, so here's a sneak peek (pun intended) of the finished artwork for the animal form event, for all of you girl feet aficionados, that Shady Two finished last week, and that's available in the alpha version of the game.