I Feel Like Any Aliens That Were Prey At Some Point In Evolution Would Have An Odd Fear Of Humans. Mostly

I think my aquariums haunted

Been playing a lot of Rain World. Here’s the slugcat - a nible survivor in an unforgiving ecosystem. I loved the game and it’s immersive storytelling, highly recomend it!  More rain world animations to come 

i drew the ending

This is a gentle reminder to those who keep poultry to PLEASE keep in mind wild snakes if you are using fake eggs in your chicken coop. Snakes are incapable of digesting the wooden/plastic/ceramic fake eggs that are commonly placed in chicken coops to train hens. Snakes (like this little ratsnake here) can and often do eat these fake eggs and suffer life-threatening obstruction as a result!

If you need to use fake eggs in your coop please strive to ensure that the enclosure is snake-proof (difficult) or superglue 3 or more eggs together so that snakes cannot consume them and become obstructed.

August Development Update

Overview

August started out similarly to the last couple months, with progress being on the slow side and contributions being made in base asset development. However, progress began ramping up towards the end of the month, and we’re now at a place where we’re making some decent progress towards a test build. We’re only just beginning, of course; and it’ll still take a lot of time before anything is ready for the playtesters. But still, progress is progress.

This month is an important milestone in that we finally started to implement the assets we have into the RPGMV engine. At this point in time, we now have the beginnings of a playable city in the works, and we hope to refine it into a state where we can give you some sneak peeks sometime soon. All I can say for now is that I’m personally very excited with how the city looks, even now at this primitive stage: I can’t wait for you all to see it.

Progress

As mentioned previously, the most noteworthy progress made in August was that our base assets are being implemented into RPGmaker. However, this in no way means that other areas of development weren’t touched upon: in fact, quite the opposite. Everything we’ve worked on during the past month includes, but is not limited to:

With a few exceptions, maps for the city that will be shown in chapter 3 has been implemented into RPGmaker

Basic map events have been put in place that allow map movement, door accessibility, functioning stairs and elevators, etc

A number of cutscenes, as well as NPCs, have been mostly implemented into the game and fleshed out

A number of additional pixel artwork for NPCs and map objects were completed and added into spritesheets

Organization for various songs and the music department in general has seen significant progress

Progress was made on the writing for cutscenes and various flavor text/NPC dialogue

The game files in general were reorganized, as well as optimized

What’s In Plan For The City

Going into development for chapter 3, a very important and rather difficult challenge was posed to us in the form of the chapter’s playable area, the real world city. Of the two areas we worked on so far, Fallen World was based off of a preexisting area in the base game, and therefore much easier to develop; and the Neural Network, while original, was still a part of dreamworld, allowing us to conceptualize much of it based on our major interpretations of headspace.

The city is different in that this is a place entirely separate from Sunny’s imagination or even Faraway Town. This means that we have virtually nothing from the base game to draw inspiration from, and have to build it from the ground up almost completely by ourselves. This is partially the reason why chapter 3 is taking so long to complete: from a development perspective, we’re having to blaze our own trails. For a team of voluntary, part-time, amateurs, this has proven to be somewhat of a hurdle.

Our main goal with the city was to make an area that felt ‘dynamic’: basically, for it to feel like a real city. Faraway Town in base OMORI is a tiny suburban community: to that end, the buildings are sparse and short, with identical houses lining the streets. Combined with a general lack of large-scale activity and mostly static NPCs, it gives off an atmosphere of relative sleepiness, an aura of quiet. We wanted our city to provide a sharp contrast to Faraway in this aspect: we wanted it to be rambunctious, packed, and bustling.

Creating a ‘Dynamic’ City

So what makes a city ‘dynamic’? During the course of the last few months, we’ve been able to come up with a map of the city that’s filled with tall buildings tightly nestled together, in the backdrop of a tightly urbanized network of uniformly gray streets and sidewalks. All this combines to create an impression of crowdedness: however, it still falls short of being ‘dynamic’. That’s because the map itself is one half of a whole, the other half being the map’s inhabitants, NPCs.

Even with the most packed and busy city of all time, it doesn’t exhibit any life until actual people are living in it. And this is our real challenge surrounding the creation of this city: to populate the map we have with NPCs that can successfully convey the impression of bustling, busy and lively city people. There’s a few methods we can use to achieve this, such as:

Power in numbers: simply have many, many NPCs in the city

Passage of time: as the time of day changes, have NPCs move from place to place, with different NPCs being present at different times and etc

Literal movement: have NPCs literally move around, such as walking through the streets, wander through a shop, etc

While all three methods are important, and they’ll all be used for the creation of chapter 3, the third and last method of allowing NPCs to literally move around is arguably the most important. This is because NPCs moving around with the player are the most visually distinct: a room where everyone but the player stands around doing nothing is static as soon as the player stops moving, but a room where an NPC goes around doing something always has something going on, looking much more lively.

Take a look at this shot of the cafe, for instance. The player is mostly standing still, but two NPCs (the brunette waitress and the blonde waiter) are constantly in action: cleaning tables, washing dishes, entering and exiting doors, etc. This, combined with the map of the cafe itself and the patron NPCs sitting on the chairs, is what creates a ‘dynamic’ atmosphere.

While we’re just getting started with the NPCs, we want to eventually finish the entire map out that radiates the feeling of being ‘dynamic’, as described above. We’ll be putting up periodic updates on how we’re doing on that front with the dev updates in the future, so please stay tuned.

End of Summer Break?

It’s September now, and everyone’s summer breaks have mostly come to a close. For our team, this year’s summer break period was characterized by a time of generally slow progress. Now that it’s over, things have indeed started to speed up: while early August still had little activity, things gradually picked up as the month progressed. The last week of the month marked the zenith of this growth, with considerable progress being made in all sectors.

Still, it would be rather naive to think that this fast progress will continue on for the rest of the semester. Midterms are still very much a thing, and right now is just a short period between summer break and exam period. Still, we want to use the opportunity we have right now as efficiently as possible.

September looks to be a promising month in terms of progress. We won’t take that for granted, though. We’ll see you next month, with hopefully lots of news. Thanks for reading this far, and thanks as always for your interest in Reverie!

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

Reblog for sample size

Yes I'm serious, no I'm not okay

(I'll be tagging this and further parts as #buzzkill aquatic so feel free to use that tag too if you use my aquatic expansion in your art/animations/fanfics etc)

Next part (tail edition):

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Buzzkillchainsaw

Tagging this and any previous/further parts as #buzzkill aquatic. Feel free to use that tag whenever you use my aquatic expansion in your ow

i love AI characters in media!!!!! its so interesting to see how humans invision what an artificial human would act like!! we barely even know ourselves, but we imagine the minds we could create!!! do robots have morals? emotions? fears? do they dream? can they love? give me all of it !!!!!!!

A small comic in honor of the new vid {Spoilers Kinda-}