Hello everyone!! The new year is approaching and with that another year of Act 0 development and some other stressful stuff, before we go over what I've worked on these past three months... I have something for you...

Happy belated [HOLIDAY]!! I have a gift for you for this [HOLIDAY], come on! open it!! open your [HOLIDAY] gift!!

IT'S A PUPPY!!!

Okay but for real now, there wont be any more seasonal update posts next year, my last semester of highschool is coming up and that comes with a lot of stress, 5 daily hours of extra work that they dont pay me to do (not elaborating further) and a lot of effort to not fail from my part.

This doesn't mean there won't be any posts, I'm just not commiting to posting one every season which is why I started making them numbered now.

This means though that development will slow down for at least the first half of next year, which isn't as bad as you'd think considering what I've got cooking up for this update post.

Let's get to it then!!

[EVERYTHING SHOWN IS A PLACEHOLDER UNLESS STATED OTHERWISE, ALL WORK IN PROGRESS]

Well that was quite the Graphic Format I just Interchanged with you.

FIrst off, the battle system's layout has been changed yet again (I swear it won't happen again) and the transition animation has been fixed (which I'm not even sure I've ever shown working).

The Gimmick for the battle system has been fully implemented into it now as well as using items and gaining HP and SP from them!!

What does that mean then? well, it means that it's pretty much done now, aside from a few more things I'd like to add (I'll get into it later) and some visual polish, the system itself is... done...

The inventory system is done as well... Only things left for the menus are the options tab and the status tab.

"What does this mean then, is it ready?, is preview 2 finally on the horizon??"

no shot, no.

here's a list of everything that I think off the top of my head that is left in order for me to actually start putting content into the game:

-Finish menus (status and options tab)

-Polish dialogue system and add a choice menu.

-Rework battle system's code to be more comprehensible and easy to reference.

-Add dialogue when a battle ends.

-Give an item when a battle ends.

-Implement finished sprites for the battle system.

-Make more sprites for the battle system and implement them.

-Death

-Finish concepts for all six Gimmicks

-Finish Sean sprites and implement them into the animation tree.

-Save files and save file selection

-Plot flags

-???? ??????? ????? ?? ? ????????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? ??????? ??? ????? ??

And finally, the most important thing in this list:

-WRITING

I have somethign to confess: There has only ever been a single draft of the story of Act 0, and that one's been scrapped, I only recently started working on another one, it's been in my head this whole time, I've never given myself time to write anything but a couple of pages since.

This is actually good believe it or not, writing is probably the less time consuming thing out of all the things in here which makes it great for me to work on for the next 6 months of next year, specially since the reason I never gave it much time was because I wanted something to show and I couldn't really show snippets of the story as just a block of text, that's lame, to me at least.

That's pretty much everthing I've got this update post, hope everyone had a nice time these past few weeks, I'll see you when there's major news, hopefully sooner than expected...

Hello!!! I hope everyone had a good summer and that autumn’s been treating y’all right so far. Sorry for not announcing that there wasn’t gonna be a summer update post here.. It didn’t really cross my mind until now

Before starting with game development updates I have something very special to announce and unfortunately for you, it’s not preview 2 but it’s still cool…

20th of October 2024, The first track of the Act 0 soundtrack will be released in its entirety.

Really excited to put this one out there, after getting familiar with all things music for almost a year and for almost every single day I think I’m finally ready to make music for the game. I whipped this up recently and in the middle of the night so some changes might be made to it in the final game… I’m still really proud of it though and I hope that you all can enjoy it (and take it as compensation from me for purposefully missing an update post).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s actually start with the update post.

First order of business, some things from last update post have already changed but desaturated Kris from Deltarune is still here, I’ll talk about that later.

Let’s see what the battle GUI has been up to as of late:

As you can see for one, the aspect ratio has changed and the overall interface looks less… stylish. This isn’t the final version of the battle system though, I made some graphics for the menus (Attack, Ability, Item) but they haven’t been implemented yet and the bottom part of the screen won’t be a big black brick for long, I haven’t really figured that one out though…

There were also a few improvements made on the battle system itself, like the amount of damage an enemy can deal, defense, the amount of damage YOU deal and such, it most likely won’t be “final” until playtesting though.

Another thing you could probably tell from that image is abilities! The gimmick hasn’t been fully implemented yet but a significant amount of progress was made. I decided to stop so I can work on something else though and that’s…

 A dialogue system of my own!! Ever since my other project went to shit because of a plugin that made the entire game unplayable I decided that I should be able to make, read, control, and debug every system in the game so I’m trying my best to make pretty much everything now.

Here you can see an NPC that glows to indicate that it’s interactable, a dialogue box sprite that for once is final, a talking portrait and me skipping dialogue (believe it or not that was the hardest part to make in this system). The glowing outline probably won’t be a thing in the final game by default but will probably be implemented as an accessibility feature whenever that starts being worked on

There’s also a dialogue system implemented into the battle scene, took me a while to figure out how to make it spit out random selected lines but it works now.

And uh, these lines are placeholders… if that wasn’t obvious…

Lastly, I’ve been working on respriting and reanimating Sean, a little while ago I started working on his respite and finished up the walking animations in all directions. Recently I made running animations but unfortunately they had to be scrapped because they were going to conflict with a lot of stuff in the game, I’ll show them off one day.

I already mapped out all the animations I need to make for Sean but I’m a little stumped because I’ve been wanting to make his hair animate real good and smooooth, so you probably won’t see the finished sprites for a good while until I feel happy about that specific aspect.

Thank you for reading!! Remember that announcement I made at the start of the post!! I’ll see you next Winter!! :3c

i sure hope finals dont beat my ass

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.

Hello! I hope everyone's been doing well because I haven't!.

This is a short update post about some stuff that's been happening to me, I'm gonna start with a short paragraph about Act 0 but after that, it's just about me, I don't expect anyone to read it but I feel like I owe this to the newgrounds folk who I only update every three months- sorry about missing the winter one by the way, that was not at all in my plans.

Well, first things first, right?

Act 0's development has been rocky at best, I've been dealing with a lot of engine issues, one of them involved updating the engine to godot 4, a task that (after weeks of trying) i failed, only around mid last month did i decide to start over from godot 4, and just take the assets i might need as I go re-making the game. Lately it's been good but some stuff from later on this post demotivated me a lot and made me not want to work on the game as much as I did- well, some things impeded me, some things made it harder, some things made it slower, and some things made it-- as i said, demotivating.

One last thing before i wrap up this little section, I want to start being more transparent about development from now on and I technically have been, but I've been limiting myself as I've been working with placeholder assets that don't belong to me so, at the moment I can't show a lot and because i want to start being more transparent I guess I'll throw a fact I've intentionally tried to avoid hinting at for a long time out there: Act 0 is an RPG and it's gameplay is inspired by RGG 8 and Deltarune. With this I am done with this section, if you were only interested in Act 0 you can stop here, I will not blame you.

Okay, I'd like to talk a little bit about how I've been ever since I last wrote on here now.

Almost exactly a year ago I wanted to pick up a guitar and learn songs from bands and artists that I liked, I only really gained interest for the instrument itself in the summer and ended up actually getting one in late october, I absolutely loved it when I got it, I still do and have learned a lot ever since then, I now own a classical, an acoustic and a uke. Picking up an instrument has made me really excited about music, so much so that I've started to write songs now- of course I still know jack shit about music production but eh, who cares, I enjoy playing and making stuff up on it, I don't think I'll ever be interested in messing around with a DAW in a serious way again, even if I do know more about music now than i knew back then. What I'm trying to get across here is that 1)This newfound passion for guitars and music has slown down other projects as I've been playing guitar all fucking day, 2) Don't be surprised if you ever see me on the audio portal. To wrap up this part about my new hobby I'd like to recommend a song I've been practicing on the guitar from a band that I like, they're here on newgrounds as a matter of fact, you might've seen them around, they're Good Kid, the song is called Madeleine, even though I love their rock songs, this song has a special place in my heart, even though it is about a relationship it reminds me of my friends, those who i love most. I linked Good Kid's newgrounds page but you can find those songs and more recent releases in their profile's links, personal favorites from them are First Rate Town and Witches- WITCHES, LISTEN TO WITCHES GO LISTEN TO IT GRAHHHH, but I love all of their music. I also listen to Crywank but that can be an incomprehensible can of worms to some people so I won't go into it.

i want to talk a bit about my life here, less about my hobbies and just things mostly out of my control that have just been kind of happening to me, I guess.

This semester has been hitting me hard, remember how I said last time that I run around a kitchen 4 times a week, well now it's three which IS better but now I have six day school weeks instead of five and that with the fact that the only time I ever get out relatively early is friday, I barely have time for myself, I don't want to explain myself on why again so I won't, I've written about this on an NG post before but I'd like to add something regardless, I think I'm depressed as shit. A lot of things have been really affecting me, you can fairly assume that school is fucking me up but, there's a lot more to it, I originally thought I would get into it here but honestly, I've still got to fight some demons, I fear it might be too personal, just know that I do not feel purposeless I just feel without direction, I don't know what path to take to get where I wanna go, it was pretty clear before but now it isn't I guess.

In times like these I like to remind myself that I am not my mental health, that despite the fact that I come back home sweating with the urge to scream at the top of my lungs while playing guitar, I am pieces of the people that I love, I am memories and that I am loved.

Thanks for reading, It's been a year since I started to write these, I'm sorry the one to greet the new year wasn't as climactic as you might've expected it to be. Anyway, I haven't worked on the game for a few weeks now, but now that I've written this, I'm gonna think about it all week, gonna get to it soon, thanks again.

Okay, I'm making this quick post to address some stuff, nothing "serious" but just technical issues that prevented me from doing stuff I said I would do.

I'm too tired to write a concrete news post so here's a list of all the things that happened from november to january regarding everything ACT 0

-I said that Preview 2 would come out in December which ended up not happening.

-Preview 2's estimated release was possible if no technical difficulties were present

-Technical difficulties were present

-One of the main plugins I used randomly stopped working on Godot 3.5

-Game needed porting from Godot 3.5 to 4.2

-Porting caused my save file system to break completely, needing a COMPLETE REWORK (still being worked on)

-While this was happening important gameplay mechanics were either missing or not yet implemented.

-All of these things combined caused me to announce that Preview 2 wasn't coming out in december and that it was just gonna be shadowdropped

-It is January 14th 6:00am

-Porting is close to being finished and regular development can go through as (not but almost) planned.

As I am writing this my break ends tomorrow and I have 6 day school weeks now! Shit!

Yo Bro Why Are You Doing That!!

ACT 0 Ain't Drop Yet Bruh!!

Don't Worry PREVIEW 2 Drops December!!

b

HELLO EVERYONE!!! I got a lot to say in this post, I'm not exactly sure when this will be uploaded, I am insanely busy in these next few weeks so i decided to get this over with as soon as possible and also I haven't had internet for maybe 6 hours now (IT HAS BEEN 3 DAYS AND COUNTING SINCE POSTING), I don't think they're gonna fix it soon (THEY HAVEN'T).

The news for these past few months are plentiful!! we got a new game in the works and many plans for it, I hope you all absolutely love it, I'm separating these in sections of development because it's been a surprisingly active couple of months, here it goes:

Another game?:

The idea started when I was in a very long car ride and i thought "what if..." and it was only that until I was on my way home and actually thought of it being a viable thing I could do. So then, the next morning i started sketching characters I had in my head, building the game slowly but surely in godot, it was going REALLY well. That night i looked for a musician who could help me with music for the game because i suck major balls at music, after days of work i got ScullRoy (check his stuff out, it's really good) to make two tracks for the game based on stuff i had made.

In about THREE DAYS i had everything i needed to build the game i wanted to make, with them i made a teaser video with the first few minutes of the game, i could make the whole game... slowly but surely... but I wasn't yet pleased... it was looking too easy so of course I HAD to add more stuff to it... I messed it up...

But, what's the game about?:

Alright, before I actually go ahead and tell you what happened after those surprisingly active 3 days, I gotta tell you a brief summary of the game, right? how else are you supposed to be interested?

This game takes place in the same universe as VOID, and is closely related to that game's storyline too! The idea originally started as a maybe 10 to 15 minute playtime small game to get people excited for VOID but you know me, it's a lot bigger of a project now than it was when i started it three months ago, I called it a "prologue" and it's original name was "VOID: PROLOGUE" (how original), then I wasn't even sure if it could be considered a prologue so I called it "ACT 0" or "VOID: ACT 0" if you still wanted to keep it as closely related to VOID as possible.

Here's a vague synopsis: Sean, a man made of shadow and darkness, a detective, goes to investigate an abandoned research facility disguised as a shack in the middle of the woods, finds the first ever telescope and evidence of life outside in outer space, as well as his origins being that the only thing he remembers about them is a voice, telling him he has a mission.

Do I have your interest now? Well, if not you could always check out the preview video i made that i don't know how many times i need to mention in this post GO WATCH IT IF YOU HAVEN'T YET. Anyway it's not only Sean who is in this game, there's a few more characters involved, here's three of them only, to avoid as many spoilers as possible:

Sean:

Shadow man, glowing eyes, a smart but cool guy, literally has "hair" that flows/flaps(???) in the wind, works as a private detective in a small wooden shack they call an office, can fight if necessary, works with Cheryl and Alan at the office

Cheryl:

I don't have a physical description for her yet I'm still working on her design, smart and brave, would probably push Sean into a fight before he thinks it's necessary to fight, she gives details to Sean at the start of the game, works with Alan and Sean at the office

Alan:

Accountant.

Intern.

Very competent at his job.

Works with Sean and Cheryl at the office.

Alan is a dog.

You will SEE all of these three characters and a couple more in the game, there's technically one that has spoken already in a public thing i released but you don't know who that is yet.

What happened next?:

After those three days I did a bunch of things that were planned since the beginning, designed a few rooms, wrote more dialogue, questions and scripts, the usual. I then went on a 1 week long trip, I had to bring my brother's laptop for some school stuff to it so I took the opportunity to put the game on github and put the godot project on my brother's laptop as well so i could work on it when I had nothing to do in the trip, on that period of time i mostly worked on a saving system, an options menu, an Inventory and general polish, it was great because all I was doing in the summer break at my house was work on the game NOW I can work on the SAME GAME but i was in someone else's house, it was actually very nice. I started having a bunch more ideas after I got back to high school, when i didn't have as much time to work on the game like I did in summer break, the very least i did in that period of time was imagining myself working on it. Since then it has been a month and i have not touched the godot project since, only sketchbooks, my notes app and art programs, oh! and also VOID, remember that old thing? SHIT I FORGOT TO SAY- VOID is not getting moved to godot 3.5!! (this is good news) turns out I was stupid I figured out a lot of issues since.

What's next?:

Well, finishing the game of course! and that involves a BUNCH of things, most of which are self inflicted and some not really necessary like for example, re-spriting and spanish translation (spanish is my first language so don't worry about it being shit). There's of course A LOT of things I won't address because no one knows about them yet- Are you even sure what genre of game this is? you only know it's a top down so it could be anything, maybe it's a shooter, or a visual novel, what about an RPG? action or turn-based? or maybe an immersive sim? (it's not an immersive sim, DO NOT GET YOUR EXPECTATIONS TOO HIGH), maybe you can't even control the character- HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT THAT?.

What's stopping me?:

Two things: Time and school, how are those two different? good question actually- my school is very "active", i have to run around a hot kitchen 4 days a week with a hot suit on, and then on top of that still do regular school stuff, so all I want after getting back home every day is for everyone to give me a fucking break. I still do concepts for the game but most of the times I don't feel really in the mood to open godot and get shit done, which is why the idea machine keeps running and running and running.

I do want to get back to getting shit done soon though, since I am actually running out of ideas, there's a lot of things I gotta add now that I wouldn't have had to in the past month or so, it'll be fun!(hopefully)(please).

One more thing (it's actually two).:

ACT 0 has a twitter account! follow for updates and teasers! they get them sooner than you all do here.

I've mentioned it before but not here, there will be a news post for when this game is about 50% done*, it'll discuss even more details and also will have actual non shown graphics for the game! unlike this post.

*editing this about a month later, it might be a video instead of a post, for the sake of promotion, i could still do both but you know.

Goodbye?:

I wanna thank daydreaming for making the development of this game impossible and the fact that i failed three classes TWICE in the last semester of high school for that as well. I'll see you all in the next news post!, hopefully that wretched creature will stop coming over to chew on my internet cable by then.

Hey- you wouldn't forget about watching that preview video I released and told you about a little bit ago, right?.

That's all I have, good night!.

A PREVIEW FOR MY NEXT GAME IS DROPPING IN AN HOUR, GO CHECK IT OUT I WORKED REALLY HARD ON IT.

HEY ALL! It hasn't been much time since the update but I've got something to say! It's about VOID:

I'm announcing something soon about it, i will here when it's ready too but, if you wanna get to see it as fast as possible and also get some quick short and sweet development updates after the announcement then you might want to follow the twitter account i made for it! @V0ID_game

You might ask yourself why it's looking so mysterious right now, well that's because of the announcement obviously, it'll stop being all fun mystery stuff once the "announcement" is out (not really, you'll see).

I can guarantee you that you will not expect what will be announced, like at all.

That's pretty much it! get excited for it! or not! bye-bye!

Hey everyone!! I got some bad, BAD news!! And some GOOD news! Not some “good, GOOD news”, just “GOOD” news!.

As usual I hope everyone is doing well! I've been doing alright, very stressed but i got some time to write this down and feel a lil better about myself, so it’s not that bad.

Alright, let’s talk about VOID:

April, I got some stuff done in April, mainly stuff relating to menus and save files, which I now know how to use! That’s gonna be very handy for some stuff i’ll mention later on (you’ll see this when i get to talk about June), I also posted that over on twitter and Instagram, and now here! Take a look.

That’s footage from exactly April 22nd so the stuff like the options menu being WIP wasn’t true a few days after that (although now incomplete because of some stuff that’ll happen in June so i have to re-do it, I’ll get to that), I also made that music that’s playing in the background, I'm still not sure if I’m going to leave it as is or remake it, knowing me i probably will though.

That’s pretty much it for April, so let’s briefly talk about May, i decided to not do anything in may, I was about to start finals and some other important school stuff. I just decided to halt development until I was less busy.

June, month of big decisions!, so at the start of June I had some ideas. I wasn’t happy with what the game was at that point and I decided to change the whole genre of game I was going to make. At first, VOID was going to be a really simple game about dodging little bullets and just getting to a finish line, to me–at first, thought this was fine for my first game, but then i started to think the idea was boring the more i designed levels, whenever i played around with the player controls it didn’t feel like what i wanted the game to feel like was suited with the style of game i wanted to make, instead of changing the player control i changed the whole genre, it is now a roguelike.

Once I made that decision I started to make mockups and have more ideas than I ever had for this game, so much that the final product might be too long to be- on newgrounds… oops.

So the game grew a little bit more than I ever expected it to grow, which is actually pretty good for me (for some reasons I won't disclose at this point in time), but probably not good for you because you don't get cool game soon… BUT DON'T WORRY! Remember that announcement I said I was going to do a little after this post? Well I'm not doing it after this post, I’m doing it now! Because honestly It’s not that huge of an announcement anyway, here it goes: VOID is getting released on steam when it’s done, but getting an early demo here on newgrounds before it releases. If u have no idea why this is a big deal, here's a brief explanation: VOID is my first game i plan on fully developing, It was planned to be fully a newgrounds exclusive, since it was going to be small game at the start.

I also got some other stuff to say, remember the bad news part? Well, here it goes… I'M GONNA HAVE TO RE-MAKE THE WHOLE GAME FROM THE GROUND UP. Okay so to make it short, i'm having a lot of issues rn with godot 4, so much i’d rather just use godot 3.5, all the tutorials/guides i’ve found for stuff i want to get in the game is 3.5 and is weird to translate to godot 4, I'm not even sure if it’s possible at this point, it’s that bad.

Oh! I also revealed what the player character looks like in a lil art post, check that out if you haven’t!

Thanks for reading the VOID section of the update! I will try to make some shorter stuff here before it releases, maybe participate in some game jams? Who knows! I’ve also been thinking of making some devlogs, especially now that i have to re-make the game, I’ll think about it, maybe that can be something in between not wanting to work on the game.

Alright, I'll briefly talk about my personal life because I decided to make these just “SEASONAL UPDATE”s and not “SEASONAL VOID UPDATE”s, u can just skip this whole part if u want lol!!.

School has been very stressful, if u guys dont know, because i live in a different country the way our highschool works is different to what some of u might think, I’m like 80% sure we got as much work as a university student would have while studying at university, so It’s pretty hard to be doing this kinda stuff on the internet while also doing that, i think it’s mostly harder because i think i got adhd or smthn, I'm not sure though, don’t quote me on that. Anywho, i still did bad in school, as bad as I did last semester, I'm kind of ashamed of the fact because i really want to be in school, like– I’d rather not but I'm fine and cool with doing it if It’s the best thing i can do at the moment, I also gotta do more work if i fail classes and idk about u all but i’d rather do my last exam and bail, like- I'm good, y’know.

Recently the heat has been cranking up where I live. I used to have a working AC but it stopped working around the end of summer last year, it wasn’t that hot, I didn't really mind, so we didn’t do much about it, big mistake. As I'm writing this there are two fans running in my room, the ceiling fan and a pedestal fan directly behind me, I am wearing a tank top below my shirt, it helps to not feel the sweat in every inch of my body, I have to sleep downstairs where there is a working AC so i don’t sleep and wake up drenched, tired and dehydrated, I’ve never had to take such drastic measures before and the man that repairs the AC hasn’t showed up the days he’s said he would come over, send help.

For the ppl that decided to stick with me through that rant, I’ll leave you with some stuff I posted on twitter, plus some stuff I've never posted! Don’t tell the other guys but u all are secretly my favorite, shhhh.

I COULDN'T GET GIFS TO WORK FOR SOME REASON HERE SO HAVE THIS

That’s about it! Hope y’all have a good and fun couple of months! Bye-bye! :3c