I'm super excited to say that @spicycoffee finally released her animation yesterday! Check it out here:
She's been working really hard on it, amidst all the other tons of things she had to do the past few months. To see that it's finally out makes me really happy for her. I've also been helping out with some of the voices, the gameplay footage (more on that in a sec it's pretty cool lol), and the music. I already released two tracks, and the other three will be uploaded Sunday through Tuesday:
I wanted to share a cool thing I mentioned about the gameplay briefly in more detail: When Emily was explaining what she wanted to do for the video gamey parts, she said she wanted to do everything in her animation software. She'd still have to make assets and everything for it to work as well. But I had an idea and just told her, why don't we actually make the game, and record the footage of it? For those who don't know, me and Emily also have a game we're working on called ME-OS (which is available on Steam to try out as a demo!), so we had the perfect place to sandbox this in. I quickly coded two engines, one for the RPG game and one for the FPS. Then I put Emily's assets in, imported all the animations she wanted, added the music I made and bam, a videogame for an animation about videogames!
That's kinda cool right? If you like that, then good news, it's gonna be extended a little bit in a fun way. You'll see hopefully soon what I mean by that...
Other than that though, some news about ME-OS! As you might have seen, we recently had the new ME-OS LIVE, as well as a demo release on Steam finally! There was a new little teaser trailer and everything...
Well something really nice, for the short time it's been out we've got over 200 wishlists, and over 800 demo downloads! I really wasn't expecting numbers this big. I'm struggling with advertising, but I'm trying to do the best I can, and it feels like it's kinda paying off! All of a sudden I see people talking about how they liked this or that in the game, how they're excited for some other stuff, and honestly that makes me really happy. I gotta try harder and be more consistent with my marketting stuff, but if you wanna help out by making the community bigger, definitely consider dropping by to the Discord! It's my biggest metric right now to see where we're at with the game, so anything helps :D
Making posts/sharing things has been taking up most of my dev time recently, so I'm still trying to find the right balance, or maybe even the right approach to getting the game out there properly. But the time I haven't spend marketing, I've been working on a few things that are goals for the next update, as well as collecting info for what people want to see most. I've made a poll on the Discord, and in order, here's what people said they want to see in the next update most so far:
Syho (first person shooter, 4 votes), Gon Ball Rally (marble racing game, 3 votes), Jump Wars (platform fighter, 3 votes), SP Struct (level builder, 1 vote), Golf Dimensions (3d golfing, 1 vote), and Sky Balls (infinite jumper, 1 vote)
I was honestly surprised by some of these, but they are now in consideration! If you aren't on the Discord but would like to voice what you'd like to see most next, feel free to comment under this post and I'll happily consider as well :D
Otherwise I have lots of fun plans for ME-OS, and will continue working on them. I also want to upload and share more of my art, which I never do, especially now that Art Fight is a thing again. If you guys wanna do Art Fight stuff with me, my profile is octopus58 on there as well! I'm also updating wiki stuff, since I have been drawing a lot of my older creatures from 2010 and having to write stuff on them now. Fun fact that I don't think anyone knows, I don't leave any creature behind that I ever drew! So yes even if it was some poor scribble from like 2009, I have to turn it into a creature and put in on the wiki... This probably helps explain some of the more random looking ones lol
But yeah besides that, life is busy. But honestly, after something that happened yesterday, I am extremely grateful for it. I had a health scare that I needed to get tested for, as it was a big chance I have something not so good. But I got the call, and was told that I tested negative, which made my whole day. I have many obstacles since the beginning of this year, but getting past this one felt extremely relieving, and I can't thank God enough that it's something I have to worry about anymore. It's hard to find balance recently in doing all the things I need to (balancing between work, our game, music, art, exercise) so I don't find much time to relax at all, but what's important is that I'm constantly surrounded by wonderful people, and I'm always trying to keep going forward and never stop.
Little bit of an emotional paragraph above lol but it was just a mini life update. A funny story from recently actually happened two weeks ago! I went to the beach with my family, two days after the ME-OS demo went live. I told myself that I need to relax, stop checking my phone every two seconds, etc.. And I kinda did that I think, somewhat... but I decided to do something for fun on the car ride back. I wanted to search up ME-OS on YouTube, thinking that I wont find anything but just for giggles or something idk. To my surprise (and partial horror) I noticed that not one, but two videos were uploaded already on the demo! I was excited and started watching in the car, but that excitement turned to horror as I saw that both people managed to find some bugs! I knew they existed, but I thought they were gone from the demo. Since the beta testing scene isn't really too big in ME-OS and it's mostly me and a very few others occasionally testing the game, the person playing found a way to glitch the game and oh man. I was thinking to myself, now two of the only videos on ME-OS not by me have bugs in them, for everyone to see... The bugs were fixed literally the moment I came back, I wrote comments about it, etc. and I was still freaking out. However I thought to myself, hey what can I do, I'm like the only person coding this game and these things are inevitable. At least one of the people playing said they like the game anyways and are gonna wishlist it! So yeah just funny experience lol.
But anyways, gonna continue working hard on ME-OS, gonna continue always helping Emily, gonna continue making music, gonna continue trying to help out others with feedback on their stuff, gonna keep drawing, writing, and all kinds of stuff, so I can put out some cool stuff for you all! If you read this far, thank you once again, I super appreciate it and that's very cool :)
Have a nice weekend, and have a great week ahead!
-MG