I'm about to go down for the count after getting dose #2, so I guess why not do a check-in?

Last week was pretty much a full week of working on Rhythm Quest stuff, though I took a bit of a break on Thursday, and got a few other things done (music stuff, pixel art, letter writing, the usual).  Progress has been good so far -- I haven't actually been working much on the game (besides some unnotable input system improvements), but have been putting in good work towards setting up a mailing list, discord server, website, preview videos, and all that.  It is admittedly a bit intimidating how much "extra" work there is to do outside of the giant "actually work on the game" task, but that's just how it goes, really.  Perhaps I'm jumping the gun a bit on some of this stuff, but part of the idea is that there should be some sort of web presence and marketing in place from the get-go.  And hey, if I'm motivated to work on this now, then so be it.

I ended up playing some more Hades, getting 32-heat runs with every weapon -- interestingly enough, some of the other builds were even easier than the one I initially used.  Been chasing some of the achievements in the game, and am hopefully going to wrap up with that soon.

I finally started playing Rhythm Doctor!  Figured it would be good research for my own game, in addition to of course just being a well put-together and innovative thing on its own.  Rhythm Dr occupies a bit of a surreal space in my mind (and perhaps other people's minds as well?) due to it having had an early flash demo so long ago (that honestly could have been sold as a game on its own) and because people in the RD community (which I am admittedly not in touch with) have been playing the beta version(s) of the game for years now, probably creating custom levels, and all that stuff.  Anyways, it's been enjoyable so far, though there is something funnily stressful about this kind of rhythm game where you feel internally pressured to try to avoid missing any notes.  This sort of thing is easier to get over in DDR and IIDX and Pop'N because of the sheer number and density of notes; it's easier to just say "aw well, I'm not bothering to even try to FC this stuff" and just move on.  But with the Rhythm Dr stages so far it's always like "you SHOULD be able to FC this if you're on point" which is ironically more stressful.  Minor point, though.  I'm currently on stage....I forget....4-X I think?  I feel like this is the sort of game where it could end way before I expected or it could have way more content than I expected as well, so I really don't know.  The actual gameplay is good of course, just as advertised, pretty much.  There are a few other thoughts but they'll probably wait until later, really.

I'm down to the last remaining Animorphs book and I think at the end of it all I'll probably want to write some sort of longer retrospective overview on the series as well as analyze some themes and go into depth on my thoughts on the characters.  The main characters vary wildly across the board (and sometimes across the series, due to ghostwriters) on how well they're written and/or received by people, and I think that is worth thinking about.  Tobias, for example, has consistently good writing, and I felt like his books were overall the strongest across the whole series.  But some of Rachel's books took a nosedive in quality, maybe because the authors didn't really "get" her?  And then nobody likes Cassie because I don't think her character was well-done, but it's worth thinking about how her character =should= have been written.  Things like that.

I did some more Rhythm Quest work yesterday (setting up a presskit, etc.) but I'm pretty much taking today and tomorrow off at the minimum to probably just be a zombie in bed and watch anime/play games/read books while drinking copious amounts of fluids and whatnot.

Oh, also, Ludum Dare results came out.  We did very similarly to last time (with Hide and Seek), placing 47th with an overall rating of 4.267 out of 5.  Stay tuned to catch the more fully-fleshed out version of our game and all that.