Rain is here <3

It seems to be checkup season for me as I have/had appointments with my doctor, dentist, and optometrist these two weeks.  So far the doctor and optometrist both told me that I'm looking pretty healthy, but we'll see about the dentist...haha (pretty sure I'll have to get some work done).

I think my goal for the upcoming Ludum Dare (10/4-6) is actually going to be to use Godot Engine!  I've had almost no experience actually using Godot (I downloaded it in the past a long time ago), but I'm feeling quite optimistic about it based on everything I've read, especially after they released their major 3.0 update.  Godot is open-source (no licensing whatsoever!) and looks to offer a 2D-optimized workflow (no silly hacks to get your pixel art working properly), somewhat of a hybrid between the lightweight nature of Flashpunk/Flixel plus the editor/scene view of something like Unity.  I'm actually feeling very hopeful that this will be my future engine of choice, though of course the only real way to tell will be to give it a test run.  Of course Rhythm Quest will still have to be finished up in Unity, but I don't think that's a huge deal to be honest.

This does mean that I'll have to ditch all of my Unity code that I've accumulated over the years, but hopefully a lot of it is things that I don't NEED anymore in Godot as I won't have to do my own boxcasting and 2d platformer physics implementations anymore -- that kind of functionality looks to be baked in so all you need to do is write the actual kinematic physics logic.  Audio functionality seems to be promising as well, there's even a page dedicated to syncing audio with gameplay, so you can tell these are issues that they're actually thinking about.  Of course need to look into playing around with the engine before LD actually hits, as well as maybe building out some common functions that I might need like screen transitions and the like (this could also be a good time to implement some fancier transitions rather than using screen fades for everything).

I've certainly got a lot of things to take care of in the remaining half of the month, but I'm getting through them one by one (already took care of the FNW setlist for example).  I guess here are the main things left that HAVE to get done in this timeframe:

- One or two more birthday letters to write
- Write a few Inktober letters ahead of time so I don't have to do them during LD
- Need to do pixel art for September Monthlies
- Pixel art commissions -- I've drawn 57 sprites, need to do ~43 more
- Warm up project for LD using Godot

There are some other things that would be pretty nice to get squared away as well:

- Clean up room decorations...
- Need to finish a remix for a Patreon request (I've already started)
- Finish work on my 4-wide trainer so I can publish it (mostly a bunch of documentation and formatting)
- Pixel art for some various album covers....

So yeah, a bunch of stuff.  We'll see how much of it I actually get through, but as always, as long as I'm making steady forward progress, I can't really complain.