State of Decay #9 (June 2025): Small updates + Quick look at some backgrounds.

Three quarters of a way to a full year of SoDs, you wouldn’t imagine it but I’m starting to find it difficult to think of different ways to write this opening paragraph; I could probably copy paste it and only change the important details over and over again, I’m sure no one would notice, but that’s kind of lazy and I hate looking lazy. Well, whatever, it’s getting to that awful part of the year called “summer” which means that not only is it warm again, but it’s also constantly bright outside - Annoying, but at least that’s good for my sleep schedule.

Anyway, this month’s been a little productive, nowhere near last month, but still a decent bit more productive than my output for the rest of this year. I’ve made new versions of the boss background and stage 1 (A/B) background to match the quality of the new stage 1 (C/D) background. I made some new general sprites for effects and such, it’s hard to describe exactly what I mean here so I won't, but think like grazing and enemies dying and such. There’s been some genuine effort to start on the sound effects, this whole time I’ve been using placeholders I made in 2022 and it’s about time I get started on making some that actually sound nice; unfortunately, gathering good reference material (ripping, organising and naming sound effects in nsf format) takes a *very* long time and is *very* boring. Probably the most exciting bit this month is that I’ve made (as of writing) three whole pieces of music this month! That’s *still* less than I really should be making a month, but I’ll take it, especially considering I’m happy with two of them.

Before I get to the main feature this month I thought I’d discuss the current state of demo 0 as that pesky first anniversary is creeping ever closer…

The *hope* is that demo 0 will be done by and released on September 4th; is that date within the realm of reasonable possibility? Yes. Is it a likely date? No. I’m going to work towards getting it done for then, but if I don’t make it, I don’t make it - I won’t stress myself to get it done for then. Currently I’m only working on things that will be in demo 0 until I release it; which means in terms of assets alone, it’s near done; in terms of the videogame half of the equation… let’s just say I’m probably going to be rewriting a substantial amount of code again, just to give it one last round of improvements before diving in - Nothing from the ground up, I think I’m beyond that at this point. Well, except maybe the generic boss code, as it currently stands it’s well meaning spaghetti, perfectly functional and bugless spaghetti, but still: spaghetti. Also, if (when) I miss September 4th, demo 0 will just come out when it’s ready, I won't wait until the next anniversary, well maybe the next *TALENA* anniversary (March 1st) if it’s done only a week or three before then, but not the next *Toparo* anniversary; that would be just silly. It really shouldn’t take too long though.

Oh, also, I made an itch.io, you can find it on the sidebar to the left (bottom of page on mobile). It’s all placeholder right now, so there’s no point in checking, but it’s better I set up the basics sooner rather than later. I’m not going to go into *why* I chose itch.io, but as much as I hate it, it’s unfortunately the most sensible option for distributing my games for the foreseeable future.

Considering the sort of but not really impending release of demo 0, it’s kind of hard to come up with things to talk about in these blog posts (or at least, a bit hard*er*) because anything I talk about might be made pointless by releasing demo 0. But I’ll just ignore that and continue on with minor things not a single soul cares about! Said minor thing being two stage backgrounds and the boss background - That’s interesting right???

This is a mockup of the Stage 1 (A/B) background. I’ve shown this off plenty of times before, but it’s never quite looked like this has it? Well, after I made the C/D route version of this background, almost all of my old backgrounds looked super ugly by comparison, so I decided I’d just update them to match. The main additions are: changing the pavement, using the new nicer water, adding more decorations, and making the road look just a bit nicer. The main issue of making the road look nicer (more detailed) is that there’s only two dark greys in the colour palette which made it so much harder to make it look much better; I eventually (after about three hours of bashing my head against a wall) ended up with this, it’s only a marginal improvement, but it’s more in the spirit of the other background now. Also, fun fact, the main repeating road texture is actually a stock image! It’s impossible to tell because I took a high quality photo of a real road and turned it into a repeating 64x64 pixel sprite with only three colours (and heavily adjusted the final result by hand) - But I think that’s neat.

In terms of in-universe stuff? It’s a bridge that connects two parts of a city across water; well, calling it a “city” might be pushing it, there’s certainly city like sections but I’m sure most people would just call it a highly developed area if they could see the whole thing at once. The bridge itself isn’t used by many people anymore; mostly due to the fact that a bunch of ghosts and such have claimed it as their own; no one's kicked them out because it’s just easier to use another bridge or, y’know, you could just fly around it. Morgan and Kenji clearly never caught the memo because they decided to fly straight over it…

This is a mockup of the Stage 1 (C/D) background. I’ve already shown this exact image off before, but that was a few weeks ago and I’ve slept since then, so it’s basically brand new. I initially made the promenade (the bit on the right) almost a year ago at this point, after that it ended up unfinished and abandoned for months until I was starting to finish stuff that needed to be done for demo 0. The rocks are actually from a super old background made for Toparo ~ the Brilliant Shining Light (the only salvageable thing from said background), I reused them here as they fit perfectly and don’t look half bad. The sand sprite (and all the decoration) is what really pushed this background to a step above my previous efforts. In the past, I had just used a generic repeating two colour dithering pattern to represent large areas of one thing, but it looked pretty bad as sand, so I went and made a specific sand sprite which ended up looking so, so much better. The extra decorations were something all backgrounds would end up getting at some point, but this was the first background where I had made all of them - this mockup just crams basically all of the decorations onto one screen, but they’ll be more spread out in the actual game.

For the in-universe nattering: While this beach promenade was very popular and lively back in the day, since the Ancient Underground became such things as: “Ancient” and “Underground” it’s lain pretty dormant just like the rest of the Ancient Underground. Due to recent plot events (that aren’t fully set in stone so I won't explain in detail) some parts have become much more lively, including this area near the beach. Why? Well, the protagonists aren’t here for that, so it’ll be mostly brushed over… I’m sure if there was a way to play as someone who *does* care you’d be able to find out a decent bit more :P But VS mode is in the far distant future, so ignore that for now~

This is a mockup of the Boss/Spell Card background. It uh, looks kind of odd right? Well, literally everything is supposed to be moving, so a mockup doesn't really do it “justice”; also there’s some background elements that aren’t in this mockup (because they’d be a pain to place individually). There are three main layers: the front grid, the back grid, and the background. The two layers of grids move in opposite directions of each other (imagine it’s a big mesh sphere) with the one behind obviously moving slower. The background of the background is sort of like a starry/space sky which is also has a grid like shape in the pattern; it’s actually a heavy edit of the sand sprite where I took and rotated the different layers to make a new pattern, probably saved me hours of work and you wouldn’t even be able to tell unless you extracted the sprites and directly compared them. It’s not lazy, it’s efficient (^^;

You might be a bit disappointed to learn that all bosses share the same background and yeah, I am too; basically: giving everyone their own background would take forever and a day, especially if said backgrounds also had to look good. If you go far back on my Twitter/Bluesky or even my YouTube channel, you can see that bosses were planned to all get individual backgrounds. It would just take too long and it’s a corner I’m willing to cut but then immediately smooth over with some sort of vague lore reason. At least there are seven colours of the background, one to match each colour of magic, so there’s at least a touch of variety?

Hmm… a lot of big paragraphs this month aren't there? Makes it look like there’s less here than there actually is (not that there’s much to begin with). It’s about time I stopped writing this blog post and got back to something more productive. I can’t exactly push September 4th back, can I?

…The next thing I have to do is sound effects? Y’know, maybe I’ve done enough work for today, I think I’ve earned a break~

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This month’s crystal ball grazing: It’s better to wait for things to come to you rather than forcing them to happen right now; but to get things started, you’ll need to do a bit of the legwork yourself.