Oh god, I left the heater on.

Hello, time for a status update and a bit of a info dump of what's been happening with me for the last 8ish months.

• KCS Ch. 4 - Finally out to my editor, current word count is about 5670. Likely to post early next month.
• PMDT:DX - Little work done since last, mostly polish and some mild overhauls.
• Bird Game - PC modeled, lots to do, but cut scope and still working on.
• Other Gamedev - Working on a small project to break up constantly working on Bird Game, that is a Tower Defense Card Game. (Publishing this or next month)

Anyway, I'll go ahead and elaborate under the cut.

Kobold Cursed Sword Chapter 4, really hasn't been the highest priority this or last year, but like middle priority. Most of my energy and effort has been going to working on gamedev stuff, but I would occasionally work on the new chapter when I could. My plan is to have the next chapter (chapter 5) be the final one as at that point I would likely be looking at 5 chapters with about 25,000 words among them. 

I have ideas of stories to tell with Bix and Solaris after that "final" chapter, but to be honest I think finishing this one story about them, should serve for the time being, and I should focus on other things I am working on before writing about them again. Personally long form narratives are difficult to write for me, and I like doing stuff that is smaller in scope or less narrative based. Such as the PMD Tabletop stuff. 

Switching over to that not much has been done regarding the PMD Tabletop system. However I'm kind of gearing up to respec the move's damage and level requirements and some of work has been done to allow non-combat stats to have a bit more use while in combat. Tabletop game systems are a complicated beast, and if I'm to be honest I want to give the system enough time to be fully realized. Of course this means it will all take more time to finish, and I'll likely do testing before I fully release it, but I want to do a good job and have something that feels polished.

As for the bird game, this has been my higher priority for quite a while. Lots of time has been poured into it so far by me any other people who are also working on the game. One of the player characters has been finished so far, along with a handful of enemies for the planned demo (as in modeled, not fully implemented). We have a reasonable amount of work done on the systems the game will be using and while progress is slow, we've recently reduced the scope of the game demo and are slightly rethinking our plans for the full game.

While the demo is very much a scaled down version of the full game, its scope is still very large in comparison to the majority of the projects we've done before it. Meaning there is quite a bit of learning new things and a ton more work than any of our prior projects have required. The closest thing to it in scope is Just Pong, which was an idle game with pong as the main gameplay. Which took months to get to the more stable and finalized state its currently in.

Now last but not least is the game that I am currently working on as a small respite from working on the Bird Game. Its a tower defense game where players create a deck of cards to play much like Dominion. Now so far we've been doing development for around a month, but our usual programmer has been a little tied up during the development process so the progress was slow. However in the current state the game is in, we are likely looking at finishing this week or next with a simplistic version of the game. I did the card art, 3D modeling, and some of the coding which has been surprisingly a lot of work to do.

For an idea of the breadth of the art work on my end, we have 7 towers with three levels for each. While the level 2 of each tower was streamlined, and the level 3 towers we designed as simple modifications of the level 3 towers. That was still about 14 models I had to get made and finalized. In addition there is the massive amount of card art that I needed to do. 26 of them needed to be original art, while the other 21 were renders of the towers. While I was able to choose a simple to execute style, and cut corners when I could the artistic output was a large amount. Then there is the deal of having to make the card backs and front template.

Honestly the biggest upside of doing the cards and getting card templates and card backs designed, is that I got to try out Affinity Designer to do the vector art. I was using Inkscape for a while, but the thing had a habit of crashing all the time. Affinity Designer seems more stable, and was pretty easy to learn. I would suggest it, given its a one time payment for the software, you can do a 10 day demo, and it works well for vector art.

Anyway that is all for now. I'll try and keep you all updated a bit more often this year than last, but its just kind of hard when the best you can drop is "I just worked on this one game this month" and that's about it.