June ‘25

Introduction

Okay, so it's been over a year since my last post........my bad. I just kept telling myself I had more important things to work on instead of writing updates. But I should have been making time for these things! I should have been making time for a lot of things, to be honest.

I've felt like a hermit lately, voluntarily shutting out the world to tinker away in solitude. But a hermit isn't seeking isolation for isolation's sake; they're looking forward to the day their work is finished, and when they can come back into the light and share their tinkering with the people dearest to them.

That's a hard feeling to sit with, though. You are, in a way, telling your brain to focus inward and your heart to focus outward. It's cognitive dissonance, and it will manifest as feelings of anguish and heartache if you don't keep it in check.

I definitely haven't always kept in it check during this process, but lately I think I'm doing better with it. So if you're one of those aforementioned dearest people in my life, I promise this isn't a cry for help. This is just a check-in to remind you that I love you, and I'm so so excited to finish this game so that I can share it with you. Thanks for loving me too :)

...

Sorry, what was that?

You came here to read about my game, not my big feelings? Oookaaay weirdo. If you insist.

Character Appearances

The characters in this story all resemble the actors who performed in this play with me. I thought I was doing a decent job of making the character models somewhat resemble their real-life counterparts, but I’ve improved a lot since making most of these characters, and it’s become painfully obvious that I had no idea what I was doing with some (most (all)) of them.

While reworking the character models, I started to notice that the non-realistic skin and hair tones I gave my characters—which I lovingly would refer to as Muppet Colors—started to look out of place as the characters became more realistic in form.

Now, as I'm revisiting some of my earlier character models to clean them up, I'm realizing the colors just look kind of...weird. Maybe I'll revisit Muppet Colors at a later date or with a future project, but until then, skin will be skin-colored and hair will be hair-colored. And the snozberries will taste like snozberries.

New Areas

In the original performance, we were limited to the physical space that we were using. We obviously didn’t have the time, permission, or physical capability to make any adjustments to the literal infrastructure of the English Building for our little play.

But I do!

When the player begins a new game, the building will be completely unaltered. But as soon as the story begins, certain locations will be entirely transformed. Some changes will be more subtle than altering an entire room, but I don’t want to spoil any of that fun stuff yet…

I’ve got a few more rooms to make, and then I’ll go back and get serious about decorating them, so kindly ignore the sparseness and any placeholder shapes you see. Here are a few that I’ve been working on!

NPC Tool

The last time I wrote an update, I was working on a set of tools for myself to configure the NPC animations and props. I quickly realized at the rate I was working that I'd have to create a separate tool for lights, sound, and all the other kinds of cues, which would be a lot of separate tools running at once and sending information back and forth. So I slightly changed my tack and combined all the logic into a single mega-tool that configures EVERYTHING. Building this tool ended up being an insane undertaking that took up the majority of my life in 2024. It’s clunky, slow, and flawed, but I love my child and I do not regret the time I spent carrying it in my brain-womb. Let’s talk about it!

I want to go over the details but there are so so many and you would probably find a lot of them boring, so I'll just stick to the big-picture stuff.

Pictured above is the "direct" screen. This screen lets me assign animations to each character's timeline, with the ability to modify things like rotation, or snapping the animation to a certain point in time or space to be completely in sync with others. Basically, I'm doing the initial job that the director does for a play: plotting out the basic path that each character will take throughout the story.

Then we move on to this second screen, which I call the "rehearsal" part of the process. To begin, I select a character and an animation. That designated character will snap to the beginning of the designated animation, while all the other characters snap to the correct offset of whatever animation they would be in the middle of at that time.

Why is it called the rehearsal screen? Well, on the lefthand side (red) we can scroll through a list of all the characters and where they're at in their current respective animations. Selecting a character will populate the righthand side (green) with any cues that have been assigned to that character on their current animation. From this screen I can edit cues, delete them entirely, or add brand new ones. Depending on the type of cue I'm configuring, I see a pop-up that looks something like this:

So just like a director uses the rehearsal process to enhance the scenes that the actors have already memorized, I’m using this screen to enhance the animations of my characters with lights, sounds, and MORE!!!

Getting Serious

For anyone who’s still reading this far down, thanks for your genuine interest in what I’m doing :)

This next piece of news probably isn’t as exciting to consume since there aren’t any pictures to go along with it, but it’s still pretty exciting to me: this website is officially the home of TRHART, LLC.

That’s right, I’ve filed the articles of organization for a limited liability company that I’ll be using to publish my game on Steam.

I was going to delay doing this until closer to the end of the year, but I have a very strong marketing opportunity coming my way in a couple of months, and having a page up on Steam is going to (hopefully) make a huge difference.

That also means I’m going to try and put some more effort into this website! Some more pages talking about the game and my super-official company, and maybe (MAYBE!!!!) even some more frequent updates! Who knows? I sure as fuck don’t! Thanks for reading!

-Tim