Progress Report 1-29-2025 (Status update, and new rainbow bridge obstacle preview)

Hey everyone. First off, apologies that this update is so late; 2025 is off to a bit of a rough start over here, and I've just been trying to keep my head above water. It's mostly the same things I've been writing about in the last few updates, like the knee/jaw pain, neither of which have really improved since the last writeup. I've been trying to spend more time at my desk so I can start streaming again, but I still haven't been able to do so for a long enough period of time without the knee pain getting really bad, so I'm not sure how much longer it'll be before I can physically handle streaming again. I've been having a resurgence in my insomnia too, so my sleep has been absolutely terrible, and trying to get a consistent sleeping schedule has been brutal.

All that being said, I'm actually mentally doing a bit better, despite all of the physical problems. I've been doing a lot of work on my mental health, focusing on the little wins and trying to be kinder towards myself, and it's definitely helping. My anxiety has gotten really bad since I had to stop taking some of my medications, so I asked my therapist during our last session about a referral to a new medicine doctor. I'm still waiting to hear back about that, but I should be able to start seeing someone soon, and hopefully that'll help me get my anxiety back under control. I'm hoping I can get on some kind of medication to help with the insomnia, too; the anti-anxiety medication I was taking before also helped with sleep, so I think that's part of why it's having a resurgence now.

Anyway, that's enough about the personal stuff. My CPE work hasn't been consistent by any means; I started the year off pretty strong, but had a bad string of non-productivity when we were dealing with some stressful life stuff around the middle of the month, and I'm still recovering from that a bit. My goal right now is to get on a consistent daily schedule, so I can get my work done at the same time every day, though the sleep problem has been making that annoyingly difficult. Still, I've been feeling good when I sit down and get productivity done, so I'm pretty optimistic that I'm on the cusp of getting some amount of normalcy back into my schedule and work life.

I mostly spent my work time on the cutscene updates as part of the story rewrite - as usual I can't really get into that stuff much for the sake of spoilers, but I also spent some time a few days ago implementing a new platforming obstacle that I wanted to show off today! Beware that this has some mechanical spoilers for an upgrade you get near the end of the current demo, though, so if you don't want to see that then you should probably skip the gif that's below.

I'm pretty sure I've talked about it before, but I decided a while ago to do a functional rework of the Hoverjets upgrade to make it more interesting, and hopefully make it trivialize movement a bit less than it currently does. One of those changes is making the "extended dash" no longer a dash, and instead having Alicia transition into a high-speed sprint that's still affected by gravity, unlike the previous functionality. Because of that, some of the level designs that previously made use of the Hoverjets' ability to cross large gaps have to be reworked, and that's where this obstacle comes in:

Once the rainbow bridge is triggered, it continues moving forward fast enough that Alicia can only keep up with it if she's sprinting, and I think it's going to be really fun to design some platforming challenges with it! I still have a bit of polish work to do with it (like adding sound and lighting), but I came up with the idea and fully animated+implemented it in one day, which is a lot of productivity compared to usual, so that felt really good. It might sound silly, but it was a nice reminder that I am still capable of making this game a reality, and my fears/doubts are mostly just my own brain being an ass.

Alright, before I wrap up this post, here's our daily updates from.. the entire month? Jeez, January disappeared right out from under me. I really dropped the ball with posting updates this month, sorry about that! I'll make it a top priority for February to post at least every other week.

Aaaand that's enough out of me for one day. I hope everyone else's 2025 is off to a better start than mine, but slow as things have been, I'm gonna keep trucking! I'm looking forward to seeing how things improve once some of these physical issues I'm dealing with are taken care of; I really want to get back to streaming again once I can physically handle doing so. Thank you all for reading, and we'll see you again in a week or two with the next update!