Last week’s achievements

* Added hit rates to all existing damaging attacks
* Added critical hit rates to all existing damaging attacks
* Tweaked EP costs of ~80% of attacks that cost EP

Current focus

Character design.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for Tango, Telia, Kelly, and Princess Leaf; pending Flora’s availability, send in requirements for other characters, title screen art, or ending screen art

Comments

Positive battle progress for sure, but…

This week’s big news is that my wonderful character designer Flora informed me last night that she’s changing careers and will no longer be freelancing as of some time in August (approximately). Obviously I wish her all of the best! I’ll be hoping for her success in whatever she does and I’ve already prayed for the same and will continue to.

On a personal level, this hits very, very, very hard. As I write this sentence, it’s 11:33 AM; usually I don’t even wake up until 2:00 or 3:00 PM, so I can’t post these devlogs until 4:00 to 6:00, but I didn’t have the energy left to stay up late last night and I didn’t have the inner peace to not wake up early today. Drained and unsettled!

Flora will get a mega farewell email from me, that’s for sure.

On a professional level, I spent a few hours assessing how to move forward and we’re actually in about as good a spot as can be imagined given the circumstances. She and I finished (or will finish) designing various “groupings” of characters from the same social circles, so the foundation is at least 90% there and we can be very happy with that.

On the flip side, the groupings who we didn’t finish either didn’t start or pretty much didn’t start: we never touched the characters of a certain alien-like species, we never got to any non-humanoid creatures, we only did one of the serious antagonists, we only did one of the comedic antagonists, and we only did one of the superhero characters.

In other words, we focused extremely well on primary protagonists and important NPCs. Even if art style discrepancies creep in between Flora’s designs and another artist’s designs, any dissonance should be diminished because the characters themselves serve different roles.

With all of that said, Flora’s still here for now and she’s giving herself a transition month of dedicated freelancing to find fitting cutoffs with her clients, so I’m devoting all of my efforts to getting as much done with her as possible. I’ll do game dev stuff during any lulls between sending feedback and waiting for new drafts, but my main goal is to close out this artist relationship in the strongest way.