State of Decay #13 (October 2025): Small updates.

It’s now been one whole year of monthly blog posts here… Not sure what else to say on that front other than the fact that, re-reading that first post, a few things here and there are already outdated (^^; Oh well, that’s what happens when you work on something and don’t have a ‘100% this is exactly what I’m going to do’ plan.

This past month has been pretty strange for me, for the first week or so I didn’t have any internet at all! This meant that it was the perfect time to work on some truly mind numbing things, well, *one* mind numbing thing - Sound effects. Thanks to this, I’m now completely past the tedious and annoying part, now I just have to make them all which I’ve made a small start on; I’m just going to have to treat it like the bullet sprites: little and often, maybe about five a day~ but I’m currently not anywhere close to hitting that as an average, oh well…

The rest of the month was a bit strange as well, considering I *just announced* an album, you’d think I would've put some decent effort into it, well, I didn’t obviously, why else would I phrase the sentence like that? It’s mostly because the lack of internet for a week put a stop to the nice bit of momentum I had built up, although I’ve now gotten it back, it’ll take a bit of effort to redirect that into making more music again; not worried about it though since I still have two months and a bit before it needs to be basically done (^^; Otherwise I’ve spent most of the month drawing a bunch of new stage enemies, there were a couple old ugly ones that needed redrawing and I thought I might as well add a few more while I was at it - As of writing I’m not done yet but it *should* result in the game having 78(!) stage enemies, I’m sure that’s enough, right? :P

It also came with the unfortunate addition of two more midboss only characters, mostly to fill in for both the A/B and C/D “””stage 9””” midbosses being the same as the boss thanks to no other existing character making sense as the midboss. Now there’s quite literally *no space left* for any new characters; all of the midbosses are now plot relevant placements or midboss only characters who have nowhere else to be put. Takes us to a grand total of 30 characters, which ends up as 35 playable shots… And that’s *before* VS mode which’ll add at least ten more - not sure what scares me more, the amount of shottypes to make, or the amount of *music* to make (it’s the music, it’s *so* the music).

Anyway, that was kind of lengthy, the ‘Small updates’ bit usually only takes one slightly oversized paragraph, but that’s good because I don’t have anything else to talk about… But it’s technically the first anniversary of the blog itself which is (totally not under any circumstances) worth celebrating - So to Hell with it! Let’s go back over that aforementioned first SoD and make addendums for what’s changed in the past year!

‘There are 4 main routes, each corresponding to a single shot type, each route contains 6 stages in the main story and 3 more stages in an extra story.’

The first bit is still true, but now each story is only three stages long, but there’s still nine total stages because it goes: First Story (1-3), Second Story (4-6), Extra Story (7-9). I did this because I’m noticing more and more people complaining about how Touhou fangames and the like seem to be getting longer and longer, one run lasting upwards or 40 minutes! And after some thought, I have to agree. It also should help out with another issue, the easy early game wasting your time before you get to the actually hard bit - Less of that please, now we just start at the hard bit :)

It also means I can work on each third of the game as its own tiny game and release them as I finish them in demos, technically each demo would be *four* tiny games due to all the routes playing different from each other (Excluding demo 0 of course, since that’ll just be stage one for each of the routes).

And uh… That’s it~ Just wanted to clear that up since it’s sort of a decent change haha (^^; I mean, I *guess* there are minor things like ‘Simple mode’ not being the exact same anymore, but it’s functionally identical. Suppose I should also mention the fact that I’ll release the first full version of the game without VS mode; I think it just makes sense to work on that as an update instead (maybe even just make it it’s own thing entirely), means you’ll get the part of the game you actually care about quicker at least (^^;

That’s that then, such a small SoD I don’t think it even qualifies as having anything other than ‘Small updates’ in the title, whatever; it’s not like anyone is reading this at time of posting anyway lol.

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This month’s crystal ball grazing: The feather on your head might have fallen to the floor, but it’s not like you can’t just put it back.