Hey all!

So for those that are on the Discord server, you probably know I was sick pretty much the first week or two of December :P.

Shortly after that, Smash Ultimate came out (one of my favorite series of all time, and a pretty big influence for Breeze’s combat), so I had the chance to play that a bit while I was recovering.

Outside of that, I did manage to get some things done in the last few weeks.

Programming

Not a whole lot in this area honestly this time around. 

• Wrote up some states for Grabbing and getting Grabbed. Still haven’t completed it
• I did more bulk code clean up, this time to make sure variable names and method names are consistent and easier to understand. 
• I added in all sprites and animations done up to this point into the project. That’s around 8 characters worth of animations and a loooot of sprites to import/configure
• I added “Super Armor” to characters, as well as shield regeneration. Now certain characters can “tank” hits until their armor is broken.
• I’ve made it easier to add/configure and play sound effects, screenshake, and particle emissions to animations (a major improvement!)

Unity released a new version the other day (2018.3) and we created a new “code branch” to test it out to see if anything would be impacted, and for the first time in a very long time, something actually broke 😀

Turns out one of our custom shaders for sprites is causing some type of error if there’s a light source in a level, and it will continue to stack until Unity just crashes. We tested for about 3 hours and ultimately found that out, and submitted a bug report. 

In the interim, we could turn off lights (which aren’t being used anyway), but for now, we’ve decided not to upgrade, and to wait out for a resolution for the bug or a newer version of Unity.

Marketing

I’ve been told that this is an often overlooked area in game development for indies. While I’m not sure of our own success compared to other indie games in development, I have been working hard to spread the word of the project in a variety of ways, and I’m grateful for those who have also shared the project to their friends and family, and I’m super thankful for our Patreon backers!

I’ve learned a lot of things through interaction with my fans; having expectations of how certain posts might be received, and then being surprised by things such as which characters end up more popular than others, poll results, as well as finding out about unexpected things through my fans (such as having to rename T.O because of an unexpected translation)

An example of one of the considerations I’ve had to make was choosing the best platform to host our blog a while back, and some recent events that could effect said blog.

I chose Tumblr years ago because at the time, I saw a lot of other projects using it, and discovered just how powerful the reblogging feature was (as well as Twitter). Back then, I didn’t have a lot of visitors, but was happy to at least have a place to post/share updates, etc. Over the years, it slowly grew, but around that time, I was very hesitant about what to post, what to share, etc. I felt somewhat secretive and insecure about the project.

I grew out of that as things such as character designs, animations, and game design choices began to mature, so I started showing off some of the characters/animation/more thorough updates etc. The number of followers after that rapidly grew, and I began to see followers interact more frequently, larger poll results, (and my favorite part), getting to see fans leave hashtag comments about how much they love the characters and “want to protect them” etc 🙂

You wouldn’t imagine how motivating it is to see people react so positively to these types of responses. It really helps when needing that extra push to get going on the next task on our todo lists, or even prepping for the next Character Reveal or mini-dev post.

(Anyway, before things get too real, let me move on to the point i really wanted to make)

Joke or not, tomorrow Tumblr will allegedly Thanos snap blogs with Adult content, and many users have already prepared for oncoming exodus by moving on to other platforms (such as Twitter, Newgrounds, DeviantArt, etc). While Breeze’s blog is completely SFW, Tumblr’s system for flagging posts seemed to have gone on a rampage and indiscriminately flagged content of all types.

Regardless of what happens or not, I plan on keeping the blog running on Tumblr in the interim, and keeping posts going on Patreon as well. I’ll also make sure to be more active on Twitter and instagram as well.