Game Journal #115 - Finished Monster Animations, New Year!

Hey everyone! HaxDev here back with another game journal. Happy New year! I'm excited for 2025. I even have some resolutions, including:

• Study Japanese to at least the N3 level. Amazingly, I made some Japanese friends on Twitter a few weeks ago because we both liked drawing the same character. Because of that, I have a reason to study again!

• Exercise and get in better shape. I bought the Hatsune Miku exercise game on the Switch to help me with that. We'll see how it goes...

• Release a majority of my game this year. Well, that one was obvious.

Yeah! I'm excited for this year. Life-wise, everything is really stable right now, so I can just work on my game without worries. Surprisingly, a LOT of people have taken a liking to this project now... to where I'm like, "Huh? Am I dreaming?" My Twitter posts about my game get more than a few likes, which, woah! My dream of developing Joe Maverick full time might come sooner than I think. Oh yeah, and I made some art to celebrate the New Year, too!

As the release date for my game approaches, I figured it's a good time to start marketing my stuff more. So, I made all my game videos on Youtube public (they were all unlisted before.) So now if you search Joe Maverick on google, you should find them... maybe? I wanted to wait until the game was in a decent state before I started showing it off...so yeah. Annoyingly, when I unlisted all the videos they were put in the OPPOSITE order from when I uploaded them. So my oldest video appears first on my page. Great job, youtube...

Oh yeah, and the art contest ended last week. I only got the one entry, but it was an awesome piece, so I don't mind too much. It's in the game now! I'm thinking about putting it in the detective office on the wall as well.

Ok, so... you may be wondering, what's even NEW this week? And, well... there's just one thing, and that's the Venus Flytrap. I finished all of her animations today. So yeah. I keep wanting to draw game unrelated things... but now that more people are asking me, "when's the next game update?" and "I'm excited for the next journal" I'll try to stay on track.

Next time, I'm planning on adding a long requested, long awaited feature... and that's the ability to change the game's inputs in the Settings menu. I KNOW it's possible (because Guilty Gear Xrd has it, and that was also made in Unreal Engine) but you'd be surprised at how little documentation on it there is online. So I kept ignoring it. Now that the game's about to release though, it'd be really bad if it didn't have that feature, so I have no choice but to implement it. Hooray.

Ok, I'll see you all next time! There should be a lot more stuff by then. I'm really going to try and get the game's first level done by the end of the month, so that the demo experience is stellar!