Ars longa, vita brevis

The last entry of this month! I wanted to do a wrap up but it's late and I want to sleep. The animation for the fusions is taking an extra bit of time and we found out that the layout that the art team did for the deckbuilder dosn't exactly fit what we initially coded into the canvas, so we'll need to do either some reworking of the code (which isn't the prettiest anyways) or just hardcode the new variables. We'll prolly go for the latter and then revisit the deckbuilder once we plan to implement Starchip cost.

A few days passed but not a lot of news, we had to wrap up the remaining bugs on the fusions and now we are working on the animations. As soon as we get something basic going we'll start with the spells and traps. This will be the last part of the main gameplay, however I was kinda pushing away this task since the art team needs to do particles / effects for each of them and they are busy doing the fields and deckbuilder. However timing seems to be perfect since there's only one field left and deckbuilder is only done. Soon we'll hopefully make the project public.

Fusions are done!! At least the underlying code it is. Polarnye wants to hunt a few bugs and then we'll get working on the animation, which is super cool. The art team is almost done with the deck builder layout and I want the fields done before September, but it's likely going to be mid-September. Anyways things are looking good, hopefully we can finish the main gameplay loop soon.

I did one character sheet and the GDD for the combat of the next game. Huff did some amazing, really fucking cool concept art for it and it's looking nice! We might do a character or two more, then onto the HUB and some Key Artwork.

Got good news regarding some studio stuff and that was super exiting. Today it was Concept art day for me and huff and we made lots of progress, I've got a good list of things she needs me to write down in order to illustrate. She also did some sketches and they look dope.

The meeting with the CEO went super well, I feel much more secure about the future of Ephemera now. I've also had a very important creative meeting with the lads for the upcoming project and most of the pre-prod design is "done", It's my job now to make the GDD's for it and bother huffie to make some cool sketches to go with it. Most of the aesthetics and narrative hooks are already in place and they sure do look like a winner. Let's hope we are up to the challenge. Hasta la victoria

Firs time i'm doing several days at once, but a lot has been going on IRL. We made big advances on the fusion mechanic, there was a lot of auxiliary work done like making an excel (ugh) of every possible fusion in the game which alongside haze we completed fairly fast. It appears that most of the ground work for it is done and now doing animations seems to be the next objective. Adro is re-working the duel UI and is done with the overlay for card info which looks pretty cool. The art team is almost done with the deckbuilder layout and Wander after a lot of effort was able to import (and improve) his work from blender into unity. Things are looking bright but I feel like my head is taking a toll. Anyways, tomorrow I'll be meeting with the CEO of a game studio that I collaborate with to see if he can give me a hand with a little bit of his experience.

A slow day since one of the cable junctions at my apartment caught on fire, luckily nobody was hurt but power was basically out for the day. It also means that for the next week I'll have someone working on changing all the cables so more downtimes are to be expected. In terms of progress Davu has to refactor a code so me and haze can implement as many fusions as we can. Hollow found a very useful template for doing the room system so that -should- speed things up.

Davu wrote the first lines of the spaghetti code that will handle the fusions. I wish there was a pretty way to handle them but we decided to get them working first and then handling clean code practices. He also suggested a very neat way to change the way we were going to show fusions in-game, which to be honest it's way better than the original. Hollow is working on the rooms but was somewhat vague about the current task, hopefully tomorrow we'll have a better answer for that question.
I'll get together with haze today and translate an old GameFAQs document into a more readable excel to reference the known fusions.

Great day, we had the first mutiplayer match from beginning to end, and while it had some fun bugs it's nothing pace breaking, so it was a very welcomed boost of morale for the team. We are also done with the Data entry for the cards and today we are finally starting with one of the biggest features, the fusion mechanic. We also managed to solve the merge issue of hollow by just recreating the changes on a branch derived from main, the other one was just too fucked up.

Davu is back on business for the time being, hollow figured that apparently the lobby system is somehow related to the matchmaking one. It appears he has it under control we'll see if it proves to be true later this week.
I made some strategic choices that I can't publicly discuss but I think they will be good for the long run, I'm confident it's the right move but only time will tell.
I've been thinking a lot for ways to improve the paycheck of the team, I can't do it now just cause' I don't have the time for it, but getting a 4th job might be a possibility on the near future.

Weird way to end the week, one of the programmers was called away by his side-gig. While it was somewhat expected this means that there's no weekend build to test. I was looking for early September to make the project public, it will probably end up being like in the middle of the month. Its okay, for now there's no reason to turn the jog into a sprint. I'll be back on monday with more updates, this weekend I'll be away at Monte. Take care readers.

Davu is done with monster card combat, we are about to have a build to test and iron out some bugs before moving to other mechanics. I want to get a sound controller working so the build has some audio feedback and its cooler. Hollow is working in the lobby system and it's pretty fucking hard to do a git merge of that, I have no clue what's causing it but we get a shitload of bugs while doing so. I'll try to merge it by myself on the weekend since there shouldn't be any releases on main.

Fun day, davu finished the face-down system and is -almost-done with switching monsters to defense mode. Most stressful part of the day was troubleshooting a git merge with Hollow. We probably need a better strategy for doing this moving forward.

Lost track of what happened this day lol. But Adro is trying really hard to learn the tools he need to be a one-man army and that's fucking poggers. We are also dicussing possible new games once Memories Reborn is released.