4/5/2025

Hey!

I've done some work reformatting the site over the last month! It's still a bit of a work in progress, but I think it's a lot cleaner and cuter this way. My main goal was to make it more flexible to work with and add new stuff to--the old layout was pretty rigid and restricted to just game development-related stuff. I'm hoping to be a little less stiff with the site going forward.

Scarred By Heaven Updates

In terms of game development work, I spent most of April fleshing out the overworld with various small minigames and side attractions, including some basic cooking and room decoration mechanics, a secondary fishing minigame at the river, a few restaurants, and an aquarium you can visit to view fish caught from the beach fishing activity!

I also set up a 'Challenge Battle' activity in a local gym, in which you can play and try to complete various unique combat scenarios--a mix of actual challenges like winning within a certain time limit or beating a boss without taking damage, as well as a few sillier things that mess with the game's mechanics. The rewards for the most difficult challenges will likely just be decorative trophies you can put in Saki's room, so you won't be missing much if no-hitting isn't really your thing. :)

I always find toying with mini-games to be a lot of fun, so I try to save making them for when I feel like I need a break from the boring parts of development. Unfortunately, the vacation's over now, and it's about time I get back to spriting and coding all the Chapter 2 cutscenes... ahhh......

(With the site renovations, I also went back and revised the About and Character pages for the game, which I felt were kind of bloated and just a little bit dissatisfied with. They're both a lot smaller now, but hopefully more succinct.)

Personal Notes

I'm trying to keep these blog posts a little more 'lightweight' going forward--a lot of the older ones were kind of rigid and stuffy, looking back. It made writing them feel like I was writing an essay sometimes...

I haven't had much exciting going on in my personal life in the last month. The main game I've been playing in my downtime has been King's Field 3--also known as King's Field 2, unfortunately.

I realized playing the similar 'Eternal Ring' a while ago that I might actually have a taste for old, awkward dungeon crawlers. Part of it is just that I find 'old-school' RPG weirdness interesting and really funny, which KF3 has a lot of. (Having the option to deliberately softlock myself by selling key items is always appreciated.) But there is actually still a lot I enjoy about the game's open-ended exploration and loot-hunting outside of that, though. I've been using it as a semi-relaxing game to play while listening or watching something else in the background, though my ability to relax at all while playing it is probably owed to having access to save states. (^^;)

Bonus Art

Here's some rare non-SBH art of mine that I made a while ago and used to display on the now defunct 'Personal' part of the site. I'll have to get around to updating the Art Archive to the new version of the site.

Until then, that's about all I have for this post. Thanks for reading!

- Promising there won't be a dungeon crawler minigame in Scarred By Heaven, HSTopaz