Well let's start with the life update first, since the dust is starting to settle a bit on that.

The car business is nearly finished; the leased car has been insured and the car I was trying to buy is in the process of being totaled, in which my old insurance company and finance company are going to be working out on the details on that when it comes. After all is said and done, for roughly about a $100 more than I was paying on the old car, I have something that's new and under warranty. If the way I'm working continues (pretty much going to work the bar 5 days a week a the theater with decent or better tips), I should be fine financially and under no real duress... Except for man children crying about live action Disney remakes.



So that brings my attention to the other half of this journal: the state of the game I'm working on.

Even though I've been dealing with some real life stuff, I have been making some progress, but I'm at a kind of a rough point now. With so much of the base mechanics built up at the moment (even though it lacks a save game state), I feel like releasing a 1.4 graybox build is pretty redundant. The "boss" I made is just a basic enemy with more health (and that dandy hat!), and while there are more plot coupons to collect, they're just scattered about some generic abstract levels. All in all, it kind of feels pointless to keep building mechanics when I don't know what the game is going to look like and be about.

So I'm planning on moving on to the 2.0 builds. Build 2.1 is the foundation of what the first 1/4 of the game is going to be like. Now if I was truly playing into the spirit of an old school 3d collect-a-thon platformer, then the hub level would be a castle or museum like place where you'd jump through picture portals to access to the worlds. But in this game, given that it's trying to be more modern in presentation, you start off in a location that represents the main character's home. The levels you visit are areas that are immediately around the home. These early levels mostly act as places to "teach" you how the game works and to show how you'll want to revisit these levels when you find the hidden keys to get some of the other plot coupons.

But of course, who is the character, what is their home like, and what's surrounding it?

While I can't be certain if it will exist in a goofy medieval fantasy land, a cape-punk modern age setting, or some kind of wuxia-cyberpunk place, what I can say is that the overall levels are "urban" or "places where people actually work and live at". This isn't your typical quest through the grass land, the desert land, or the snow land... This is an adventure through farmlands, suburbs, factories, big city centers, hotels, marketplaces, malls, sewers, subway stations, and whatever else of that nature. Basically it's an adventure in a big city and it's surrounding outskirts, in which the player starts in the outskirts and works their way into the big city.

Of course, why would someone go on an adventure like this? Well that's another thing up in the air... But the overall idea is that they were sort of "dragged into it"...

And yeah, that's why I kind of need to start building up the base environment for.

And that's pretty much all I have for tonight.