Hey y’all, hope everyone is staying safe~
This past month I was quite productive! I’ve been able to take more steps to increasing my productivity while also being careful to manage my time safely. I’m rather proud of some of the progress I’ve made! I’ve still been doing work for Lab Muffin Beauty Science which has been an occasional enjoyable break from my game work, as I quite like doing video work! I have also made some fantastic steps with Management IN SPACE!
Something I wanted to achieve for M.I.S. was a proper visual aesthetic, reminiscent of a classic CRT monitor. This look is rather common throughout games trying to achieve similar aesthetics, and there are a good handful of free resources available to quickly getting the results, but I wanted to make it my own and not just drop in the same effect I had seen before. To this end, I did some study of Unity’s shader and render language ShaderLab. It took a bit of time and experimenting, but I ended up with a result I really like and, when applied, adds a fantastic feel to the entire game. The values are also scriptable and controllable so I hope to implement some scripted animation to the effects down the line. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the standard effect in action!
Without effect. 
With effect.
I’ve also laid the ground-work and made some solid progress on the reworking of the core mechanics. While chaos is still the name of the game, I’ve tried to deviate from the idea of just playing round after round with a disjointed story and focused on allowing the player to directly control (or “manage“~) certain aspects of the game while also giving them a more hands-on approach to the variable progress of the story and game-play! It still has a ways to go before it has been written-in and the original layout adjusted to suit the new system, but this will definitely make the game more enjoyable in the long-run. I’m both happy and excited to see these new mechanic finalise!
In addition to my project and commission work, I’ve continued my monthly tradition of producing O.P.O.S games! ‘The Gang Does A Ritual’ is now freely available on itch.io, and the new O.P.O.S. is available on Ko-Fi! ‘Goblin Gang’ is a reverse dungeon-crawler where everyone plays as Goblins defending their treasure against thieving Adventurers! The game is a little experimental and runs a bit of a fine line between stats and freeform role-play, but the premise is quite enjoyable so I hope people have fun with it!
Also quickly, a bit of house-keeping; it should be obvious I’ve been trialing monthly posts as opposed to fortnightly. I’ve found that not only has this reduced some of the stress of managing posts as often, but it has also meant that when I do post I feel I have a lot more to talk about, creating more interesting reads. As such, I will be sticking to the monthly posts from now on. Additionally, I will no-longer be doing monthly posts on Newgrounds or DeviantArt, however I will still post special announcements to my Newgrounds account as I hold that community in a special place in my heart. <3
Talking about Newgrounds; a visual-article was recently recently published talking about Flash History, and I was fortunate enough to have my work included! It’s a fantastic little dive into the old-era that introduced the work to indie game development, so go support the creator and check it out!
www.flashgamehistory.com
That’s it from me for this month! I hope everyone is staying safe, keep loving and supporting one-another, and till next time all the best~!
^,,^