WEEKLY POST - July 27th 2025 - Blank page anxiety

Hey everybody!

So first off, I want to apologize because this weekly post is uncharacteristically (I'm shocked I was able to write that word first try without a typo) late. Usually I schedule my weekly posts at 15:30 CEST, and it's now 18:45 as I'm writing this sentence.

This week has been hell with my other responsibilities, and when I was able to work on the game, I had nothing left in the gas-tank.

I'm at the part where I need to get "in the zone" to write a lot of dialogue for Alex and Elena, and this time around, I'm trying to be a bit more careful, especially since I had some feedback about how bad the writing in the original release was (feedback I tend to agree with).

Writing stuff like that requires you to be able to get in the head-space of the characters, to do a bit of roleplay, and it requires peace and quiet. Well fuck me in the ass, gang, because the entire week, when the Universe was like "ok, we're gonna let him cook", my brain kept going "Sorry, there's nothing to work with in there."

(ok, the reference works better in French where the translation for what Ray says is "It went 'schboom' in there")

Long story short, I'm still working on the updated dialogue.

After that, when I finally got to work on this week's animation, even more things went wrong. This morning I had Elena's left arm all ready to be animated, cut into all the pieces, each named and everything, then I went to work on another part of the sprite, and when I looked back, I guess I somehow deleted the layers of the left arm without even noticing, and it was long ago enough for it to no longer be in the available undo-history, so I had to redo a lot of my work.

Ok, that's not TOO BAD. Just a couple of sprite to re-cut, re-clean, I can do that, easy-peasy, it will only take me maybe an hour.

But then I got a Blue Screen of Death. Thank god for the automatic recovery, but DAMN.

Once the animation was finally done, it was time to integrate it and test it so that I could record it for the animation below and BLAM, I get a new error I never had before. I have an idea of why I encountered it, but it's still so unexpected. Took me a moment to figure out the issue, but I was able to fix it by improving a line of code at the same time (which is a nice bonus).

Still. Shit week. But I do have a couple of progress of visual things to share! One new background and a new naughty animation.

Aside from that, I needed a way to get my mind off of the whole writing biz, so I did a background picture for Chapter 2. It's the gym location where Morgane works : Fit Republic.

You'll probably ask "wait, why are you making shit for Chapter 2?"
It's a fair question. Basically, on top of needing something to get my mind off of writing, I wanted to add a topic of dialogue where Alex asks Elena about the gym she already goes at, which will lead to a topic about Morgane. I needed an icon to represent the gym, and although I could've done a placeholder, I also thought I could handle it right now and be done with it.
It's less work later.

So this week's short animation is Elena doing a bicep flex from behind. Here you have the old static version and below the animated version:

You'll notice that I spent extra time reworking Elena's back on this one, because despite my best efforts, the AI kept trying to add a ton of weird bumps everywhere.

Took me more time to make, but ultimately, I'm happy with how it turned out.

I hope to be done with the writing changes for the conversation segment with Elena next week, and once that's done, I should be free to just do animations one after the other.

As for the animations themselves, all the ones that have been done so far are still the "prelude" phase, before the FMG really kicks in and starts going more 'hyper'. When I get there, it's gonna be fun!

I hope you're Sunday is going better than mine, and I'll see you next week! Cheers!