3/9/2025, 7PM

...Hello again! It's been a few months... I think the last time I wrote to the blog, winter was beginning, and now Spring is here all of a sudden. What a quick year...

I've been pretty busy in both my real life and in game development, so the lack of posting wasn't a symptom of a lack of productivity--I just wasn't really in the mood to write anything... ~

Scarred By Heaven Updates

I've been very hard at work on SBH over the past few months, more so than usual--to a point where I might actually have trouble recounting all the things I've worked on... (''^^)

Of the major additions:

• Chapter 2's story cutscenes have been finished, and the game's sandbox has been brought into a playable, semi-filled out state.
• Most of the major outdoor areas of the overworld are finished, as well as their respective battle maps.
• Sidestories are fully functional, and a few sidestories were fully finished to test it all out.

• The opening sequence has been fully finished.

• A handful of long-planned minigames and other side attractions have been implemented, including a ticket arcade and movie theater.

Right now, I'm working on Chapter 3's story cutscenes, creating them in-game and refining the script in the process. I think I wrote the last draft about a year ago, and I've actually ended up cutting quite a bit of this chapter. Honestly, coding and animating the cutscenes is probably my least favourite part of development, so it's a good incentive to try and get the script as concise as possible (lol).

I might make myself a few more custom cutscene tools to make it easier going forward...

Personal Notes

I moved to a new flat back in June, and I think I'm still in the process of mentally readjusting to the new space. It's a small, single room thing in someone's backyard, but I'm very happy with it for the price and proximity to where I work. The main downside is that the kitchen is really small, and doesn't have any appliances besides a refrigerator, so my survival entirely depends on tofu and a cheap hotplate I bought, now.

Most of my free time since then has been spent on game development, which I've still been having a lot of fun with--though admittedly I think I owe that productivity in part to feeling strangely guilty about not working. Weird how we can stress ourselves over things meant to be fun hobbies, hm? Sometimes I even deliberately avoid doing things like playing games I'm sure I'll enjoy, because I'm afraid it may consume me and harm that productivity... very silly.

I've noticed this and tried to let myself relax a little more in the past few weeks. I've been playing a lot of 'Etrian Odyssey' on the 3DS, which is a perfectly mindless dungeon crawler that's great for that.

...But things have been pretty uneventful, besides all that. A boring but peaceful life is nice, though.

As a bonus: a few pieces of non-SBH art I've made in the last few months--fanart of Dizzy from 'Guilty Gear', and a strange porcelain doll character I'm playing in a friend's upcoming TTRPG oneshot...

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...But that's all for now. Thanks for reading!

- HSTopaz