Soooo this week was my birthday and as a present, Life got me an eye, throat, ears and lungs infection.  I got really sick (to the point of considering going to the ER) but the polycule managed to get me an emergency appointment. The doctor got me on a heavy dose of antibiotics, cortisone, eyedrops and painkillers so I'm now doing MUCH better. Still very tired, but not actively dying! 

So I am a little late on my plans for My Blood Sucking 9 to 5, but we are SO back!

First of all, I hired a musician to create custom music for the game! Check out her bandcamp and her youtube channel. We agreed on 7 tracks, and I'm so so excited to include them to the game, I think it'll add a lot of dimension and interest to it.

I'm also playing around with an "animalese" idea, so the characters have "voices", the same way Animal Crossing or Undertale characters do. The code does work, but I'm not super sure about it yet, as it might be distracting coupled with the music? We'll see if it stays or not.

I also started redrawing the sprites of the game, so they are in proper pixel art and not just filtered.

Before and After the redraw

This is one of my very first attempt at actual pixel art, so I mostly traced my own digital art, but I think you can already see the improvement. I'm still figuring out how this whole thing is supposed to work, so I might still tweak things around the more I figure it out (I'm definitely overdoing it with the dithering but it's such a fun tool).

I'm also considering adding CGs to the game, but I'm once again, not very experienced at pixel art.

I'm also trying to think about the backgrounds, and if I should either do them myself (difficult and time consuming as I'm not great at backgrounds on a good day) OR commission someone (which would mean more money to put in this project, and also the difficulty of finding someone that has a compatible style with mine). I could also leave them be. I consider it lower priority as they are... functional.

I'm also looking into reworking some of the story so the scenes are more distinctive depending on which route you are, and also adding a couple of scenes to put some meat on them bones. I had ideas for an additional character that was cut to save time, maybe I can include them again.

I might have to put up the updated fancy version up for sale for like 2$ or something? I don't know how many people would be interested, as this is a very niche project I'm polishing for my own satisfaction, but it feels fair. The game jam version will of course remain for free, typo and all lol.

Anyway I'll try to keep uploading devlogs as I progress, I think it's a good exercise.

And uh... I'm always a little self conscious about bringing attention to it, as it feels very obnoxious... But I am so so grateful my little horror dramedy was voted #1 in Story, #4 in Best Game and was also amongst the gHost's Choices for the Scream Roulette game jam. I'm very new still at making games. Actually making them, I mean, I made a lot of attempt over the years but I never had the constancy to finish. Or the self confidence. It always felt like... well, nobody's going to play it, so why bother? Over the years, I managed to detach myself a little from that and just decide that since I wanted to play it, it would be enough. Even if I was the only one.

So it really is something seeing that other people DO enjoy my work and DO want to play my games.

Thank you.