you wake up somewhere new. it's so dark, you can't see anything. or... is it so light, you can't touch anything?
it's not a new place, really. you've been here before, haven't you...? yes. we'll just need to jog your memory...
...stay still. this will hurt. a lot.
hello! welcome to a post-mortem development update, on a fully arbitrary day!
before we get to PM proper, i feel like there's some surrounding context first, regarding my ability to create:
we're still not sure what the mystery disease that got me was. but it stopped. right now our best guess is that my anxiety started manifesting physically in ways i wasn't recognizing as anxiety, in turn making me anxious about what the reason was, in turn worsening the symptoms. but we don't know. and frankly, i hope we'll never have to.
additionally, my therapist is suspecting the reason my antidepressants are working less and less is that i don't actually have depression proper, but hypomanic bipolar disorder. i've started taking lithium chloride, and it's early to tell, but it appears to be working? i at least feel like i'm working much more frequently now.
not that that's out of the way, onto the development update!
POST-MORTEM DEVELOPMENT
post-mortem development is going (drumroll please)...!
...eh.
you know when people say "i don't really consider myself an artist/musician/filmaker" or something of the sort? whenever i heard someone say that i always replied with encouragement: "don't beat yourself up for not meeting your standards! if you make art, you're an artist!"
...i think i get what they mean now. i don't think i consider myself a programmer. i love music and writing, and even if i'm not great at it, i love art and animation and a whole bunch of other stuff. but programming is something i less "love" and more... "hold myself back from strangling". i find it difficult and i have trouble keeping complex systems in order and i feel overwhelmed quick (oddly enough, that's never been a problem i had with lore...)
the programming bits are not particularly parts i'm banging my head against a wall at this point, unlike when i was working on EEI0 proper, but PM is a much more complex beast. the most complicated bit of EEI0 proper was saving and loading, and dialog management, 2 things that there were plenty of guides for, but when it comes to PM it's something closer to "well, some parts of it are maybe a bit similar to seaman for the dreamcast if you squint really hard...!" so i'm having to figure out a bunch of brand new (at least to me) systems from scratch. and since i don't want to keep making tweaks that will break previous content once i'm already thousands of lines of dialog in, i'd really like to let myself mull over some of the more universal systems and feel like they're solid enough first.
that being said... it's not been just sitting and thinking! i've been working on smaller things, that won't be affected by those big systems as much, such as...!
you bring your hands to the scrap of rusted metal on the floor.
it's warm. not enough to hurt, but enough to startle you.
you can feel the texture of rust shift violently under your fingers, but it still visibly looks the same.
you put the sheet close to your ear...
...
it's nothing but radio static.
sprite work! it's not really as good as i'd like to be... but i'm actually considering it to be good enough to be workable! would still really like a more skilled sprite artist though... if you or anyone you know would be willing to help, please reach out!
that being said, classic pixel art isn't the only way i'm deviating from the usual style in PM! check out this sample of the new dialog system (and also stuff in general)!
as you can probably tell, post-mortem is going for a very, very different thing than the original game. that's really scary, as many people have reached out to talk about how much everything ends in 0 means to them, and i really don't want to "tarnish the legacy" or anything... but way back in 2017 i decided that aeden means change, and findaeden must follow suit! besides... everyone likes ambitious creative projects more than safe creative projects... right?
i'm trying my best to keep PM as its own thing, somewhat separate but still intrinsically connected to eei0. somewhat independent but still homaging the game proper.
however it turns out, feel safe knowing it won't change eei0 proper at all. your favorite girls will still be there, as doomed & dead & depressed & gay as ever, just the way you animals love them.
that's it for this development update! if you'd like more teasers than the ones i've shown, i'd love to have you on the discord! you can just mute everything but the teasers and announcements channels if you don't want to interact. but if you do, i'd love to hang out! link is... somewhere around here. at the bottom of the post, maybe. i don't know. you can find it, you're pretty clever! hell, around 1 in 9 of you are maybe too clever for our own good.