Hello everyone!! Today's [almost not] Pico day!! Happy Pico Day!! Almost missed it like last year... I'm really glad to be form part of this website, even if my contributions have been small.

Anyway, it feels like it's been a while, I don't got much to whine about like I did on the last post so let's get right into the meat, right?.

Act 0 has been getting a lot of attention from me recently and I'm really glad to say that it's paid off so far, let me walk you through all the stuff I've gone through and worked on for the past two months.

Before I start, I'd like to make one thing clear:

Most of the things shown in this post are placeholder assets that I've used in order to actually speed up development, mainly: KRIS (gray edition) FROM DELTARUNE IS A PLACEHOLDER ASSET THEY WILL NOT FORM PART OF THE FINAL GAME PRODuct thing.

And also things are subject to change, Okay? Okay.

A few days after posting the update post before this one I got to work on the game via mockups, transitions, animations, movement and things that were generally not very scripting heavy because I was dreading that at the time.

Ten days and one call with some friends later, It eventually lead to this absolute mess of an image that actually helped give me a clear vision of what I wanted, somehow.

Here's a gif of the game not functioning properly (that hopefully attaches to the post well) for reference on how the mockup ended up looking like:

Pretty cool, right?... I had to scrap the enemies and player moving through the battle scene because it was causing too many problems I couldn't bother fixing.

This has actually happened a lot, cutting corners in favor of saving time and making other mechanics easier to implement, makes it really hard to justify doing these things but it usually pays off; did you notice how there's four enemy health bars in the mockup but only three enemies in the gif? well both of them are scrapped things that were cut for time, efficency and generally just because they felt unnecessary, who wants battles to be longer and harder in a mostly story focused game where you only play as ONE character and also have limited resources? not me!

This has been a thing I've done time and time again throughout development, it's necessary, I don't have a budget, I don't have a team- if I knew how to do music it would all be me! thankfully I get permission (sometimes) to use music from the people here on NG, thank u very much u all are very nice to me ^-^

Moving on, I'm really glad I allowed myself to figure things out for this little while, I tried to compensate the short length of this post by adding a few images and such.

So to close this, I'm almost done figuring stuff out! and the game will start getting it's original assets and some new ones added soon, I'm currently fully prioritizing the battle system, so you can expect it to be done by next update post- unless something crazy happens like a main new version of godot comes out or something... Anyway, I'm very confident about the current state of the game, but I won't promise anything else!

Thanks for reading this post! Don't expect a new one soon- really; I'm taking a break from gamedev and such for the next few weeks, I've got finals and I suspect things might go the same way they did last year T-T.