I noticed a lot of my titles for these devlogs are a little negative. 😬 I do enjoy this process, even if it seems like every entry to this process journal sounds like I'm having a bad time haha. Welp, the next paragraph is going to be super negative too, but not for an exactly bad reason, life happens!

I've had several set backs over the past few weeks. Our 20 year old tuxedo cat passed away from old age, I gave myself a concussion and busted my shoulder, my day job is more stressful than ever, a lot of mundane, silly things that all come together to create several weeks of stress eating and Youtube binging. To top it off, the release of RE8 has me fighting with my fiance to get time to play it where they won't be given spoilers. Have to say that I rock at that game, and despite everything, I'm super close to finishing it, while also simultaneously neglecting my own, haha. Gave the fiance pointers on how to avoid the infant monstrosity in Beneviento's basement. Had to take a break after that part when I played it. Dolls/spooky things don't scare me but that mutant infant was... in a league of its own.

There are no serious updates right now. But for anyone curious:

1. I'm 2 routes away from finishing story-routes for the demo build. These routes will not be and are not complete, as there are locations, and character sprites that haven't been completed for those routes. This seems to be dragging on because it is, and I am. I haven't had the motivation to actually work on that part of the game right now because of my own little slip into some negative feelings, so I'm not trying to force myself to do too much other than the bare minimum right now.
2. I have to redo the ditty that plays when you're in your office, because I realized that the sounds I used are still under copyright. I thought the idea would be funny to use windows error sounds to make a song, and then realized I can't do that and ask for people to pay for the game haha, copyright is great and sucks at the same time. So I have to quickly redo that at some point.
3. I finalized 4 new secret characters, and their corresponding new locations. I'm running out of location ideas. 👀
4. I have a few little songs that play during the routes, but in order to prevent them from repeating too much, I'm going to have to make at least 1 song per character to give them a little bit of uniqueness and prevent ALL the songs from playing over and over again. For the demo build, with only 6 characters, I'm not worried about this right now, but will have to soon.
5. I'll be going through here soon and revamping build v0.1 on the Trello board soon. It needs some organization, clarification, and redo's due to some changes made during the current demo build process. For instance, if I have to sketch, line, color, shade, and then code 72+ gift options, I'll die.
6. I redid the friendship bars for a second time, this time with animations! And redid the UI for the date/event tracker for a third time. I still don't like it, so I'll be making minor changes until I'm happy with it (so, forever, is what I'm trying to say). I think I'll use some TextMeshPro and give everything a little character, if Unity doesn't throw a tantrum first.
7. I need a 2 week vacation. My day job pays out vacation on each check and I can't afford to put it in savings because the cost of living in my city is so high we live paycheck to paycheck. (Don't tell me to move, there are legal restrictions preventing me from doing so - don't worry, I'm not a criminal, it's nothing me or anyone in my family did wrong, and it's a long, personal story, just take my word for it, if I could move, I would).
8. I realized that my current characters are super vanilla! So the next group is going to have some seriously revved up people to meet! That means I'll probably have to rewrite some stories... 😩

That's it for now. Doing what I can when I can. I hope everyone is having a great Spring so far! Mine was off to a rocky start, but life moves on!