originally i wasn't going to call this post a PROGRESS UPDATE per se, but i figured since i'm showing off at least a LITTLE new stuff i might as well.

don't get the wrong idea though, this is mostly boring text!!!! don't expect much cool shit here!!!!

without further ado:

welcome back to the shadowfell devlog. we haven't really done much since we were on hiatus for a month, and the entire game still only has around 5 rooms.

i'm not kidding!! you can check for yourself... but more on that later.

so, shadowfell saga was recently on hiatus for a little while. this was partly brought on because my music commission work was taking up a lot of my time, but it was mostly brought on by burnout. to prevent this from happening again, i'll be taking shadowfell development a bit slower and easier, and because of this progress updates will be fewer and further between.

i've been thinking i should change up the format of progress updates, make it a more fun and interactive video-devlog series with more detail and gameplay stuff thrown in. think something like yahtzee's dev diary series. eitherway, the next update's not gonna be for a while.

now that we're back in development, we're gonna be taking a minute to revamping some of the visuals, mainly. if you take a look at the main page, you should notice some changes.
(the era of "sans, the fucking linguine" is over)

i'm mainly doing this because a lot of the old visuals either just don't look too great, OR are sort of unfitting to the game's general theme. the kitchen needed to be more cluttered to have enough material to turn into dark world objects, the beach looked too blocky, etc.

i've also been doing some rewrites to the story, completely cutting an entire area and character from the game. i'm estimating that the full fangame will be around 1.5 hours long, with 3 main areas, each being around 45 minutes long. this being my first game project, i decided it was important to make something smaller and more attainable, not to try and make a 20 hour jrpg when i've never even made a game before!!!

speaking of re-stuff, here's semi sheriff's resprite

i don't think i ever explained what this guy's deal is!!
semi sheriff is the protector of FLAVORTOWN, the dark world's hub for good eatin'.
he's a recurring antagonist in the game, chasing papyrus through the entire dark world because he believes papyrus is a WANTED BANDIT and a CRONY OF THE DARK LORD!!!

oh, by the way. shadowfell is now open-source

this shouldn't mean much to those of you who aren't devs yourself, but from now on and going forward the game's github repo is public.

(...the story of my programming life, really)

to put it in simple terms what this means: anyone who has a copy of gamemaker studio 2 can now download a copy of the project file for shadowfell and mess with stuff. the game is in a horrible unplayable state at the moment, but if any other devs want to watch us work like ants in a glass terrarium then you can!

this also means when the game's done, any other devs who want to use my systems for 2.5d overworld movement/collision, mario & luigi-style battles etc can feel free to just grab the code and repurpose it for their own work. a lot of people would get kind of self-conscious about that, but god when i decided i wanted to make a mario & luigi style overworld i could not find ANY resources online about how i would go about doing that.
NO info on how the original game handles it, every tutorial that made something even CLOSE to what i wanted was needlessly complicated, etc. if i can alleviate the stress of someone else trying to make a similar game, i'll gladly release the code publicly fuck it.

the only thing i really have left to say here is that i'm downsizing the team a little. a bigger team usually means a bigger game, but i'll be honest in that i'm just not very good at working with a lot of different people at once. it can sort of throw off my creative flow, and i'm certainly not a manager lol.
with that, i'll see you in (????) months with HOPEFULLY some kind of video devlog. adios!!!