[july housekeeping] the answer is a question (Patreon)

the usual, for patrons who pledged in the month of june:

• ya been credited
• ya been supportered
• ya been message if ya named
• and if ya ain't all these things in the way you like then ya gotta tell me
• also high their stuff also tell me thanks

--

normally i would do a recap post for the last month, but i've posted so little, and frankly i don't have a long post in me right now.
partly because i'd rather just spend the energy working on the thing.

but some follow ups from my last post.
firstly, thank you all so much for the support as always, i really appreciate it and your patience with me and my moods

after several more days of mental waffling, i came to an answer for myself.
i am very used to stressing about making the game faster, and your patience helps there.
i am very used to stressing about making the game better, and i appreciate the reassurance there too
but i realized mid#shower-thoughts that instead of always asking how do i make the game better, how do i make the game faster,
what i should be asking is,
how do i make the process of making the game more fun for me?

i'm looking forward to figuring out more answers to that question. answering it will be necessary.
much of it is in my personal perspective, but i've realized that because of many of the development habits i've defensively made over the years, i often approach development in the least fun way possible. if this is going to be a long term thing (and i want it to be a long term thing), i need to fix that. 

basically, i've always been the type to eat my favorite part a meal last.
lately, i stop being hungry before i even get to it.

that is an easily fixable problem, but this is a very big meal. 

--

as much as i've wanted to dive in, last more-days-than-i'd-like have been about slamming all of our various systems together, praying they work, and fixing them when they don't. 

combat text was part of that, and it caused some other incompatibilities.
our cutscene skipper was another one-- it works, but it didn't play nice with my TBS system. that's been fixed.
one thing i'm going to do after this post is making sure that players can't open TBS menus while mid-cutscene; i can do that by hacking it into the system.
movement control plugin needed fixing. we got some new text effects. discovered some quirks in the animation program that differed in game.
lots of small things.
they remind me why i need to be taking this approach, otherwise i wouldn't have noticed. making the pieces isn't enough, and i've been making pieces for too long.

but it's getting there. i'm reassured by the fact that a lot of this stuff is still first-time set-up type stuff. some of it might even be applicable to future games.
nothing to it but to do it.
just gotta do it.

i'm gonna go do it.

first, streams:

7/11 3p MST: another mapping stream, we'll be drawing tiles for a small story map
7/18 3p MST: we'll be doing, idk, something, probably. definitely streaming at least.

... and the next saturday is staff meeting so whoops. maybe we do a spontaneous anime hangout again or something too. we'll see.

as a parting gift, here's some attack animations from our most recently finished combat model. 

cheers, love, safety