State of Decay #7 (April 2025): Small updates.

Today is April Fool’s Day, I wish I had some sort of fun project to share but I don’t - It was mostly because I was too busy being ill for most of this year, however it was *also* because it feels a bit silly to invest any serious amount of time into an April Fool’s joke when I still have yet to release anything of any real substance. Regardless, it’s now SoD #7, over half a year, and it really feels like I’ve overall done only about 3~ months of serious work; I hope to increase my rate of work as I really want to release *something* playable for the anniversary on September 4th, as unlikely as that seems.

I’ll probably settle for another story though, if push comes to shove; speaking of which, I should probably write another short one before that anyway.

Hmm… well in terms of what I’ve done this month, there were things here and there, the first week was surprisingly productive (for being ill standards). I made a small push on some sprites including getting close to finishing the player sprites as well as starting both planning and work on the menu! Making the menu look nice while keeping it still somewhat minimal is something I’ve been picking away at for the better part of a year while I was bored of doing other things - it still looks awful, but a few assets that can be used in any design have been pushed to at least “placeholder” status. Other than that I got regular ill for the middle two weeks of the month; only in the last few days of the month did I start on some music, although, I *have* successfully made a singular new piece of music I’m happy with! Only over the course of four days to boot!

I would have said “That’s it!” right here, but a blog post with absolutely nothing is beyond sad; I was able to get away with it last month because I at least mentioned and briefly discussed TALENA’s anniversary, which is just *barely* something (lie), but this post has absolutely nothing! I’ll fix that by just recycling what I did in SoD #1 when I wanted to add a little something to the end - Here’s a little pointless look at three stage enemies.

This is a Spirit Conglomerate, they’re basically the generic fairy of Toparo and will probably appear most everywhere, there’s seven colours to match the seven colours of bullet types. Even though I want to have lots of visual enemy variety in the game, I thought it’d be a good idea if there were a few types of generic enemies that generally only take a few shots to take down, so you can identify weaker enemies more quickly; it’s also because otherwise only having 3-5 enemies per stage could make it confusing if the same sprite ends up having widely different amounts of health (also the obvious, being that it saves time to use a few enemies over and over again instead of making even more per stage). To add to the laziness of this enemy's existence, it’s a quick edit of a fire sprite from one of my early attempts at making a game while messing around in GameMaker.

This one doesn’t have a name yet, but it appears in stage seven of the A/B routes. Trying to make a lot of enemies for the sake of visual variety also means that a lot of enemies should be different sizes as well; if they were all the same 16x16 size, the variety would be purely visual, no effect on gameplay. The issue lies in that bigger sprites take a decent while longer to make, so what better idea is there than to make a big enemy a completely stationary statue? Lazy you say? No, no no… it’s a big old statue made of stone, of course only the pathetic little scarf moves~ Also, it’s (vaguely) based on a real set of statues not too far away from where I live.

This is a Helman, it appears in stage five of all routes, stage two in the A/B routes and stage seven of the C/D routes. This one is an *old* design, I really mean it - I don’t know the exact year, but it’s from somewhere between 2015-2017, so yeah, pretty ancient; might even be ten years old as I’m writing this (terrifying), still have the original sketch and everything! Of course, it was made for a very different type of game, but a weird flying shell thing works perfectly for a shmup. Awkward to adapt the exact shape of the shell into such a small sprite, but I wasn't willing to do a redesign because of how old it is…

Well, that’s that, anyway…

I really hope I’ll stop being ill and, come this time next month, I’ll be bragging about how I’ve knocked out a bunch of stuff. If there’s just one thing I really want to get done over April, it would be tFRT’s bullet sprites - I’ve been so tantalisingly close to having them all done since January; the only problem is that they’re a touch boring to make, so I just do other things instead haha (^^; BUT! If I force myself to make at least one every other day, they should get done next month! Alternatively, I could figure out why I’m so ill all the time recently; that might be a good use of my time… Actually… nah~ that sound like a good idea~

Also, I may or may not have had a terrifying motivation boost within quite literally the last hour as of writing this… Whether that’ll do anything for me I’ll have to see - I sure hope so.

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This month’s crystal ball grazing: Spring gives better weather, better weather still includes rain, lots of rain - Don’t let the rain stop you from going outside, you’ll find many good things if you look for them.