This month brought several welcome surprises for yours truly. First and foremost -- I found a new job that's allowed me significantly more time to work on Harmonic Odyssey and my other endeavors. That also means there will be less panic about the ongoing pandemic, as I move away from my healthcare role and into more programming and engineering work.

Having finished a small website project and handed over my remaining contracts, I have returned to plugging away at the bosses and maps I spoke of, last month. As you can see in the screenshot above, The Sabretooth and his attacks are being tweaked and refined. Enemies, and bosses specifically, are tricky things to wrangle and never seem to come together in one sitting. As an example, I am setting up the basic look and feel of this boss, but all of this has the potential to change when I finally get to connecting the parts of the game that lead to the actual fight against him. If he's too tough, too easy, or not fit for the characters when they come to do battle with him, he's going to need adjustments. I pretty much never get it right on the first pass.

Maps follow a similar trend. One of the biggest mistakes I still tend to make is building kingdoms when I really just need a castle. In other words, I often put together these huge, elaborate maps that end up as dull marches across fields of pretty scenery and nothing more. Not that there's anything wrong with aesthetics, but lack of substance in a pretty world is still boring. I take the same approach to mapping that I do when writing -- it's not exact, but the final product is usually some version of the smallest draft, cut down by about 30%.

Some days, I just want to sit down and animate, and for that, Dragonbones has been a really great tool. I can complete the first pass of a mob in about a day, from rigging to nearly-complete moves list. As you can imagine, bosses take a bit longer and don't always end up perfect on the first go-around, but I tend to have the most fun when I'm getting into the finer details of how a character moves, and to that end, they offer just as much opportunity for things to look really cool as the main cast does.

In any event, progress on the game is happening. It's my hope to have a new demo out by the end of the year, which will include The Sabretooth level in a large capacity, as well as allowing the player to dip their toes into the other two worlds mentioned in previous devlogs. 

Stay tuned 'til next time!