Done! Phew, this was intense. Apologies if it's very dense with information and visuals, but I like to be thorough.

Continuing Development

Now that's done and dusted I want to go back to developing Shivering Hearts. I've been trying to import all my drawings to 1080p but it's actually such a huge task, holy crap. I'm only now realizing the immense size of the task, especially because I want to give myself a decent amount of time like 1-2 months to fully bugtest and make sure it's as bug-free as possible. With the original release of Shivering Hearts, I nearly released it too early because I was convinced that my game was bug-free, but my friend convinced me not to release it until I'm 100% sure and turns out there were a crap tonne of bugs I overlooked, some game-breaking that were a complete nightmare to fix! I've seen some shit, omg. The horror, the sheer lovecraftian horror of bug-testing your own game.

There was this one bug where the hidden romance with Rin would softlock the entire game in the credits and that was due to 1 improperly labelled variable that I had no idea how to fix and that took over a week to fix. And this game is nowhere near the scale or have the same amount of moving parts and variables as something like Mass Effect or Fallout New Vegas or Cyberpunk 2077 so I was very surprised at finding all these bugs. I swear I was losing my mind lol.

Rebuilding the whole game would require me to rework all the game logic, character movement, walk animations, character portraits and landscapes, and it's very likely that I'll create bugs during this upscaling process that I'll have to spend time ironing out. So it might not be a while until I finish a new build with all the upscaled graphics, maybe in a few months?

Instead I want to finish and release the combat prototype I was working on in the last video based on the Suikoden duels system. I'm actually a lot closer to finishing that than the daunting task of rebuilding the whole game with the higher resolution. The coding and balancing the damage values are pretty much all there, the focus is now fully on drawing combat animations for Skye and Rin, and tweaking some of the dialogue. It'll feel more refreshing to work on actual new content and gameplay mechanics as well, because while upscaling all the drawings would be nice, it's not really adding new "content" into the game. It'll all be the same content with a new coat of paint, which is nice in it's own way but I would like to add something fresh in terms of gameplay. So once I finish the combat and release that as it's own thing, I can then fold that into the new build of the game. Since I'll be rebuilding the game anyway, I'd like to add more content like figuring out how to get more environmental animations and movement in the drawings as well.

That's all for now, if I don't see you guys before Christmas then Merry Christmas!

Not very Christmas related at all, but have a parrot in a hat.

See ya,

Mischa