Posts from February 2025

15/2/2025

Hello! I wish I could say I've been busy since the last post, but I've actually been slacking off a little by my own standards. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing...

New Phantom Enemy Types

I've managed to finish the game's first 'long battle'--basically a combat segment consisting of multiple small fights across different screens, akin to a traditional beat-em-up. The fight takes place in the 'Otherworld', so I finished up the attacks and animations of the two new Phantom enemy types I designed a while ago so they could join in.

I've got a short video showing them off here!

^ And some early concept art from about a year ago.

The monster designs are a lot of fun to come up with. The theme of 'warped mannequins' gives me a lot of freedom to do more unique attacks, so it's a nice change of pace from animating punches all the time. They've surprisingly turned out much easier to sprite than normal humans--I guess because I don't have to pay as much attention to keeping proportions or other details very realistic.

Though to be honest, I did intentionally design the gown one to be as simple to animate as possible... but I swear there's still narrative significance to it as well! And all of the Phantom designs! Really! (^^;)

Overworld Work & Other Things...

Other than that, I've mostly been up to my usual work of making maps and cutscene code. I've managed to get the beach and mall areas into a playable state, which means that every major area of the overworld is complete! I've also finished the game's first small minigame, though for story reasons, I'll be keeping the details of it to myself for now...

Now that I'm in the weeds of creating the core content of the game, I think I've settled on the made-up term 'carnival sandbox' to describe the style of the game's optional content; a small but dense overworld full of a variety of different minigames and sidestories to explore at the player's leisure--like being at a carnival! This vision will probably be limited by my lack of manpower, but I'll do my best.

I do find creating small, gimmicky games to be a lot of fun, though I usually have trouble making anything like that as a standalone product since a lot of my interest in game development also comes from the 'artistic' side of things like characters and story, and that's a lot harder for me to come up with on the fly. The format of SBH's sandbox helps with that, though, since the artistic context is always just 'Saki is doing something weird in her free time', and so I can focus on just making the gameplay.

Next up in development, I'm probably going to take another detour to work on the fishing minigame, since I've reached the point in the story where it shows up, and I've recently been struck with inspiration for a (hopefully) unique and interesting way of handling it. After that, I'll probably work on implementing more of the overworld's functionality, and then work on the rest of Chapter 2's cutscenes.

Though, I think as soon as I finish writing this post, I'm actually going to try and refactor some of the menu code. It's kind of disgusting in there. (^^;)

Personal Notes

I've been in kind of an odd mood regarding my creative works lately--I think all the running around between social media accounts when I was releasing the demo brought me down a little. Not that making announcement posts on four websites is especially tiring work, but I think the promotional side of development gets in my head too much.

'Marketing' your work is usually a necessary part of making a creative project online if you want many people to end up seeing it, but there's an implicit need to post frequently, as well as constant performance meters in the amount of views and followers you get--which are very hard to ignore, for me at least. 😔

It has a weird effect of sometimes making me think more about what to post about the game than actually making the game itself, which I'd much rather be doing... but maybe I'm just weak-willed for letting it dominate my thoughts so much. (^^;)

Either way, I really want to take a way more laid back approach to that kind of thing. I'm thinking about maybe reformatting the site a little to be a bit more 'generalized' and less entirely focused on SBH. All the current content will remain, but I'd probably give myself a little more space to post about other things I'm interested in besides the game. I'm hoping it might take some of that weird 'marketing' pressure off, and keep what I post online as pure fun stuff I feel like sharing.

This blog might change a little with that. I would still focus a lot on the game's development, but it might be nice to also use it as a space to talk about other things more often--not that I have anything specific in mind.

Thank you for reading, anyway. Until next time!

- HSTopaz

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Bonus: A wonderful photo I took on a walk the other day.