root vegetable boy
CHORUS MACHINE DEV LOG #18 - APRIL 2025
Happy May Day, everyone! I hope you all had a beautiful April. The weather has steadily been getting warmer where I live, so I have been spending much less time at home on my computer--but I have made a little progress nonetheless! :-)
I've slowly been getting back into the swing of things as far as working on CHORUS MACHINE regularly. I think a long break was good for me; it was helpful to take extended time thinking about the flow of the game and how certain things need to be sequenced. Even though I wasn't actively working on the game in February or March, I was thinking about it near-constantly, so a lot of internal decision-making got done in that time. I still consider it time well spent.
I was actually really pleased when I finally opened up my GameMaker project in mid-April and played through everything I've made so far: at that point, I had about 15-20 minutes of gameplay, which was a lot more than I'd thought it would be. (I'm aiming for around an hour or two at most to complete the DEMO. Obviously this varies a lot between players, but that's the goal...)
I spent some time after that adding new rooms, new events, and somewhat restructuring the order of everything I have so far. I gave the first miniboss a dying sound effect, and I reworked the handling of every bookshelf in the game.
I've been struggling a little bit in recent months with trying to decide how much to show/spoil while writing these logs. It's a little stressful to feel like I'm balancing the line between "fun teasing" and "showing my entire hand"... there are a fair amount of things I want to keep close to my chest for the time being. As a result, I think future logs will being to move away from including lots of images and screenshots. I know people really like seeing them, but I do want to save some surprises...
As a heads up, I am most likely going to be moving on June 1st, so that log may be delayed? Or very short?? Or both??? It's good for my spirit to make regular time for CHORUS MACHINE, but life has been so hectic lately and it looks like it will continue that way. I really need to finish the inventory system, so maybe that will be May's task...
I guess we'll see! How about you come check here in June and find out?
Originally posted May 1st, 2025.