State of Decay #17 (February 2026): Small updates + Quick look at two stage backgrounds.

Wow, this month’s felt quite long; either that’s the usual effect of the new year, the fact that I’m playing a crusty dusty old dungeon crawler that’s actively sapping my life away *or* perhaps the fact that I’ve gotten quite a lot done for Toparo this month - Hmm, let’s say it’s a combination of all three (and maybe a secret fourth thing)~

January this year has been quite cold, it even snowed! If only for a few days, it’s even been cold enough to think about putting on not just a second but a third blanket (although I didn’t end up creating the full trio… only the iconic duo). Otherwise nothing much happened in the sphere of my life, not that it’s a particularly large sphere to be fair, but that did leave me a decent amount of time to get on with things; said things mostly being a large collection of *here and there* tasks and busywork that needed doing rather than later.

I suppose I could mention the fact that this very website had a bizarre amount of hits last month; for the entire year and three months of its existence it had gotten about 4,800~ hits but January *alone* took it all the way to 6,000! How? Why? I have no idea… but by the end of the month it had slowed back down to the usual less than ten a day which is probably just me and a couple search engine crawlers… Ok - My only guess would be that I tried posting on Twitter/Bluesky every couple of days for the beginning of the month, but there’s no way *that* was the cause, right? Maybe I’ll test that again in February... On a related note, last year's music preview flopped hard for some reason, there has yet to be a single video crack ten views (prior years had 10-25 or so as an average) and a couple that *only* have views from me! (Including the one from that batch I’m most proud of (^^;). Not that I really care about any of this pointless number stuff, I just thought it interesting; what matters in the end is that I’m having fun, which I am :)

Anyway, about the things that you’re actually here for (I say, as if even after a year plus, anyone is actually reading these as I post them): it was mostly a month of drawing stuff, both finishing off a few of the not so notable things but also expanding most of the things that I had already considered (and declared) finished; at least those are all once again finished. Generally a slow month despite the amount of stuff I got done, it’s just that most of it isn’t at all notable; I suppose that I did end up completely reorganising and clearing out the quite frankly huge MS paint file that I’ve been creating and storing all the sprites in; it was kind of sad to delete some of these nearly four year old sprites I’ll never use (I did make a backup though, so it’s not really gone quite yet).

Anyway, the lackluster star feature of this SoD is a look at two (actually three, the title lied to you) stage backgrounds of no particular importance that I made at the beginning of this month in less than a week for no particular reason that I’m going to explain in a lot less detail than usual for no particular hidden agenda~

I showed this background off on Twitter/Bluesky basically the second after I had finished it earlier last month; and just as I said there, it looks a bit odd without all the animations. Anyway, it’s a tower on fire as you can see - Evidently, it’s really bloody tall as you’ll never see the top of it; just goes on forever and ever… The reason for that is manyfold: One, the tower itself is on fire (despite the fire appearing *behind* it for clarity reasons) and I don’t want to figure out how to naturally draw the top of that huge fire pillar. Two, the roof on this thing is huge, once you finally get to the top and stay there, the background’d get way less visually interesting. Three, there's opportunity to crack a ‘one hell of a janitor’ style joke, which may or may not be taken given how serious any conversation here ends up being. Four, the main part of the tower just looks cooler than the roof would ever be. And finally, five, an endlessly repeating background is easier to implement than one that eventually comes to an end + I don't actually have to draw the roof if you never see it :P

Here’s one I’m not *too* fond of, but it matches the style of the rest of the newer backgrounds and I’ve no idea how to make it look better without changing the idea a bunch (do note that this mockup crams all of the decorations onto one screen). This one takes place after the last background, the surrounding ‘forest’ burnt down and turned to ash; although this is just the cleared out path to that tower, the actual forest part is a touch offscreen. I honestly don’t have too much to say about this one, I suppose the ground, path and leaves are all edited and reused from other backgrounds; the road and path being edits of the road from that one bridge background I’ve inadvertently shown off a few times and the leaves from a really old background for tBSL! Otherwise I did debate for a while whether there should be more variations of that tree, only two seems like too few (especially considering it’s just the same tree but flipped) but I’ll wait to see how it looks in game.

This one just looks downright bizarre as a still image, and unlike the other two, this one is really suffering from the lack of extremely tedious to manually place decorations; almost everything here is supposed to move at different speeds, directions and have some sort of animation, the nature of the windows doesn't help either - Now that I’m thinking about it, all three of these backgrounds would’ve looked way better if I had just implemented them in the game and recorded them, even if said implementation wasn’t quite perfect and had that nasty frame jitter you can see in some old videos… Oh well, I’m writing this pretty close to the first, too late now! (^^; Tangent aside, this is that pesky tutorial stage I just can’t seem to shut up about. The initial idea was something way simpler and easier to make but I just couldn’t get it to look good, so I just had to come up with something else that had the same sort of idea; I’m kind of glad though, this is way more interesting than what I initially had in mind - It’ll also make *connecting the dots* between certain things far more obvious… I hope; but that’s for potentially years from now once the bloody thing is out and done~

Another short and lackluster SoD, not that that should ever surprise anyone at this point, next month is TALENA’s fourth anniversary! I really can’t believe it’s almost been four years since I actively started seriously working on (what would eventually become) this game… The SoD itself will be pretty short but I’ll be adding something new to the website, so it balances out in the end. And then the month after (assuming everything works out) I’ll have something exciting(?) to share in the April SoD, so look forward to that, all zero people reading this!

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This month’s crystal ball grazing: Some changes are good, some changes are bad; if the changes are in your hands, avoid complete contradictions.