See how Vic looks in that picture? That’s how I feel, lately!
Happy Halloween, Mythies! It’s ya person, Nine, here to deliver candy. And by “candy” I mean “game update”. Did I mention I was tired?
October was a rough month for me, in almost every regard. I’ll leave the bulk of the personal stuff for the end of the post, but I didn’t get to work on the game as much as usual because my mortal job was very busy with inventory, and I’m literally an inventory manager so it’s kinda my whole thing. However, I took some vacation time for the week immediately after we did inventory because I needed a break and I was feeling dangerously close to burnout.
In both game development and my mortal job, I kept catching myself making really boneheaded mistakes due to being so overwhelmed by just… everything. I’m pushing to get this demo done, I had to get all my ducks in a row to make sure inventory went well, Morgana and I have to adjust how things work at home with her new job (more on that later!), and don’t even get me started on how stressful election season is in the US (and only gets worse every year, it seems).
The aforementioned boneheaded mistakes resulted in me having to basically throw out and redo an entire scene. As I was attempting to do postwork on the renders, I realized a glaring issue: There was one whole side wall missing. I know why it happened (something on the wall was causing weird reflections in another shot), but that doesn’t make it any better that I somehow totally missed that Sylvia’s ballroom was suddenly an open-air venue. This game takes place in December, so even if I tried to write in a reason for the wall being gone, it wouldn’t make sense for warm-blooded creatures to be there.
One thing I was putting off in the game was designing Vic’s apartment. I knew it was going to take a long time, for quite a number of reasons:
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It’s a location that’s going to be used very often, so I need to make sure it looks how I want it. I can’t change it later because it’ll have already been seen by then.
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It’s a crappy apartment, so I have to find assets that can convey Vic’s suboptimal living conditions.
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It’s cluttered, so I have to put in lots of little detail things so there’s basically crap everywhere you look.
The render I’m using for this update shows a little bit of that. The fridge is the colour of “this thing was made in the 70s, but it still miraculously works”. The wallpaper is a lovely shade of “maybe green, sometimes”. You can’t see the carpet, but rest assured it is stained. Ky had a nice house, but Vic? Not so much.
As for the personal life stuff (other than inventory, I guess): It’s been a time of change and financial stress. We’re still very much recovering from the debt burden that the passing of two cats has thrust upon us. I don’t regret it at all, mind you; if there was a chance at saving either of those two little idiots, I wanted to make sure we did what we could. But vet bills are expensive, and Morgana missing a whole month of work due to her surgery didn’t help.
The insurance company seemed to change their minds on making us pay the full bill for her surgery, though, so that’s good! For those who forgot (or are new here, I guess), Morgana’s rotator cuff was completely torn and she had to get that fixed. After the surgery, we got an “explanation of benefits” from our insurance saying we had to pay for it ourselves, because it wasn’t “medically necessary”. I have to assume it was some weird “code” thing with how the surgical center submitted the claim. There’s no conceivable way we could have afforded a $60,000 medical bill!
Now, Morgana was working as a warehouse manager for a retail store, but she was removed from the position due to her not being physically able to keep up with it (see above rotator cuff incident, but she’s also got a bad knee). This put her on the sales floor, which is also not exactly ideal for someone partially disabled. As if to answer a prayer, she got a job offer from a hotel she worked for previously where they would match her pay and is a far less physically-demanding job. Plus, she’s exceedingly good in hospitality, for some reason. Must be her southern charm or maybe witchcraft. Southern witchcraft?
Anyhow, her schedule is all wonky (at least for now), which means we’ve been scrambling to figure out who cooks dinner on which nights, when we go grocery shopping, and when we actually do things that loving couples do together (like seeing Street Fighter). It’s working out now, but it all happened pretty suddenly – and sudden changes are not something I handle super well.
Holy crap, I think I rambled enough. Here’s a few rapid-fire things about my recent time:
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Watching: VisionQuest. Loved WandaVision and Agatha All Along, and so far loving this one as well.
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Playing: Basically just doing dailies on Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. A little bit of Magic: the Gathering Arena (Reality Facture is so fun). Got into Aniimo, and that’s an insanely adorable time, when I can manage it.
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Eating: Whatever we can make quickly, because we’re tired.
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Reading: Nothing, lately. It’s been hard to focus on reading words because brain make not letters good.
So… yeah, that’s all! Keep the Legends Alive!
– Nine
– Nine