Hello all!

As the year begins to close, I figured it'd be nice to get in the habit of doing a monthly wrap up of progress for the new game, and the current prototype. Holidays around here can be pretty hectic, so most of the progress that's been made has mostly just been the past few days after Christmas, but none the less, I figured it'd be nice to share.

My plans for the prototype were to have it completely finished by the end of the year, and never touch it again. But that has slightly changed. I believe the prototype is going to be used for things I might want to test on something smaller before adding into the final project. Not saying this is the case for every feature planned. But it's nice to have a playground to explore possible ideas and mechanics before throwing them at the full game. I already tested this out with 2d lighting, something I've never really done up until this point

The prototype finale is set to release hopefully early to mid January, the main reason it isn't out already is just because a lot of my time has been spent on the full version.

Which brings us to the new game, which I'm happy to say is currently going pretty good! Despite the fact that the development hasn't even begun. I am currently in the process of brain storming ideas for mechanics, environment layouts, endings, lore, and all that juicy fun stuff! The reason I haven't even wrote a single line of code for the game is because I want all of my goals to be clear from the beginning, and not to just tape something onto the game that was never planned to be there. IMO this step  is very important, ESSPECIALLY for game development. As you have a clear goal to follow, and you aren't going 1 step forward, and 2 steps back. That being said. I'm planning on being in this stage for possibly a month, but maybe even more if it is needed. But it should save an ENORMOUS amount of time in the long run, so I really don't have too much to show besides the journal it is all currently being held in!

This bad boy currently has about 30+ pages of ideas for the new game, which for now is confidential. But I'm very excited to share information and art that won't spoil the game in the next devlog! So stay tuned for that!

To end off, I just wanted to wish everyone a happy new year, 2020 has been pretty awful for a lot of people, and hopefully 2021 will be at least slightly better. Though 2020 has hurt me fanatically, I'm very thankful that I get this opportunity to try to become a fulltime dev. It is scary, but I feel very hopeful for these upcoming months of game dev grind, and excited to truly put myself to the test of making a full-fledged game!

If you haven't already, please check out my twitter at https://twitter.com/AyumiDev. I plan on tweeting out news on the game, so if you don't want to miss out on any news or devlogs, make sure to follow! And I also wanted to leave a reminder that you can donate to the FTWA Itch.io page! So if you have the finances and want to help in the development of the game, I would very much appreciate it!

That's all for now. Have a happy new year! And I'll be back in 2021!