Cockroach Boy Devlog #2

It seems I haven't quite climbed back up to full operations like I had thought! Here we are at the ultimatum though. Speedrun this game in a week or accept that it's just going to have to be pushed back for another time.

"What have you been doing with your time then, Karma?" I hear you ask. And for that I have two answers.

The first is babysitting! As a general life update, I should mention that my household currently includes my baby niece. And even though I'm certainly not the only one who can watch her, she is in need of constant supervision so it's inevitable that a lot of my time is spent looking after her to give the rest of the family a break. And as it turns out, babies are not good at sitting and playing quietly with their toys while you write or program or draw, haha.

The second thing? Trying to recover my ability to make art with any sort of speed. I thought when I had resumed updating the devlog that my long stint with being unable to focus after catching Covid was over. In a way it is. But it has had the unexpected side effect of still really struggling with my art in ways I didn't before.

For example, Gil Samsa is not what I would consider a complicated character to draw. He's fairly unremarkable aside from the receding hairline and casted arm in a sling.

I sketched these concepts up pretty quickly before the start of the Spooktober creating season since concept art was considered allowable.

Yet when I came back to attempt to draw his sprites, before the previous devlog even, I couldn't come even close to matching my own style!

What happened?

Why is your head like that, good sir?

Today after a couple of attempts, I managed a much more accurate representation of the world's unluckiest night manager.

It's still not a direct match, but it is what I would consider an acceptable sprite for my own works.

And this isn't to say I'm just making this update to bemoan the fact that art is hard. Art is always hard!

But I thought since I have little progress to share, I could at least give a little look into what it looks like when things aren't going their best behind the scenes.

So are we still getting Cockroach Boy?

Yes! But to be entirely honest with you, I don't know if you'll be getting it soon.

I will be doing my best to get this game made before Halloween. But if it doesn't happen, I'm not going to continue picking away at it. I have other things I've set aside for the sake of this project. I want to complete the Don't Toy With Me fanpack as well as the good ending update. I want to get that game put up on Steam.

I want to work on the demo for In Your Nature. My composer Waffle has been hard at work on character themes and his songs are beautiful! I want to show them off, but I want to save them for the release of the demo.

So in short, if I can't complete Cockroach Boy in time for Halloween, the project will be shelved until next year. Between my more substantial projects and needing to prepare for the holidays, I just won't have time to work on it again until then.

We shall see! I hope to bring you guys good news one of these days haha.

Oh, one more thing!

This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I realized while trying to send out an email about the previous devlog that somehow my mailing list was removed from my SendFox account. I have no idea how this happened and I had been originally deleting email addresses from my website host after moving them there so that I don't accidentally re-add someone who opts out of my emailing list.

The list was less than 10 people so it isn't a devastating loss, but I imagine it's quite confusing for anyone who did like getting reminders of when I was posting my updates.

So if you were on my mailing list and still want to be updated, please consider signing up again. I'll be sure to host the list somewhere secure to prevent this from happening again. Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience!

-Karma