August Update

Jeez, this month went by fast! Let's take a look at what's been going on!

First up, the work I was doing on Lucy's quest absolutely kicked my butt. After almost a full week of trying to get the code to work the way I needed it to, I had to give up. That was pretty disappointing. So the final part of her quest isn't going to be nearly as elaborate as I had planned. Feeling a bit demoralized, I took a break for a while.

But, eventually, I started getting back into it again, this time focusing on Conrad's quest! It's about halfway done, and thankfully far more straightforward, mostly I just need to write a bunch of conversations (he's a history nerd, so the quest is learning all about the history of various institutions in Doramor City).

Getting suggestions from a helpful guard.

Aside from that, in terms of direct game work, I did a little bit of further map work on the Eastern Fields, and was able to implement a new plugin that allows me to set dialogue choices as visible/invisible or enabled/disabled based on assorted conditions like switches being on or off, without the need for absurdly complex branching trees in the event editor! One of the most obvious uses for this is on the world map navigation, where I can easily adjust which maps you have access to (wilderness maps will essentially be unlocked once you first reach them), allowing for fast travel between places you've already visited.

Only three options now, but up to four more can be unlocked!

Aside from that, most of what I've done has been outside of the game, in a mix of writing and other creative works. I tried to work on the next lore article, and realized my writing "muscles" were pretty out of shape. So I've spent some time hammering out a 40K story I've been meaning to write for probably years now as a warm-up exercise, and suddenly the new lore started flowing a bit better! Weird how that works, heh. I'll hopefully have the new article ready to go this week!

On top of that, I've been spending some time messing around with AI-generated artwork! It's the new craze, and a friend of mine was posting some results from one called MidJourney, which seems to be about the most advanced one out there. Although even this one has its limitations, I've been able to coax a few good pieces out of it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else I can do with it as I figure out how to work it! Here's a few examples.

You can definitely expect to see some more of these images in future lore articles!

That's going to be it for now. See you soon with some new lore!