Hello friends, how are you doing on this fine February day? This devlog is not going to be all doom and gloom, but I am going to start there, just to give you some context. As you may know, this game is not how i make a living. I enjoy making the game, I do it for fun. If I was dependant on the game to survive, I would have been dead 4 years ago. I have a real day job, and last Fall my role within my day job changed just months before we underwent a significant expansion. I knew this was a possibility, and I also knew that it would be a lot of work for me. It has been and will continue to be for quite some time.

The last 2 weeks, i worked 128 hours. for context, that's a bunch. a WHOLE bunch.

I continue to work on the game, but let's be honest here. I am not working on the game at any where near the rate that I have been in the past. I just do not have the energy. I enjoy working on the game but it's still work. some of it is quite tedious work, that after 11, 12 or 16 hours at my day job, i just do not have the energy to even start.

Additionally, we recently had a power outage at my home after a storm which cut my computer off. After restarting my computer, Unity would no longer open the Handyman project. Unity was giving me issues about my license. I was forced to update the version of Unity I was using (I had been using one from 2021). This is always a scary process, because you don't know what Unity is going to break in your game when you update it. Thankfully, and honestly quite shockingly, almost everything worked perfectly fine after the update. Except of course the dialog system. Kind of a significant part of the game. Initially I could not edit the dialog at all. I have since updated the asset i use for the dialog to the latest version and that has allowed me to edit it, but there are new issues. Currently, none of the NPC dialog displays in the game for days 11 or 12. It just jumps from Grant saying one thing to Grant saying the next thing. Weirdly, I have found that if I give that same dialog to another character, it will display. But if I switch it back, nothing. So I can get Dean Coleman's dialog to show up if I put it in Jess' mouth and Jess' dialog to show up if I put it in Dean Coleman's mouth, but not as intended. Days 7 - 9 display NPC dialog, but weirdly, after selecting a dialog option for Grant, the NPC will repeat what he said back before saying what they are supposed to say.

I have some thoughts on what I will try to resolve the dialog issue, but I hope you can understand why I'm not exactly itching to work on the game right now. Having to fix something that was working fine before just to even begin making more forward progress is a bummer.

-----------------------------------Post Doom & Gloom -------------------------------

Ok, so here is the good news that I have. I have a solid foundation for Day 12 in place. I have several aminations started. I have the days task done. I have dialog underway, though I will say there is a lot more work to be done here. I have lots of ambition, honestly too much ambition. I'll say that I have 3 scenes, or at least 2 scenes and a quasi-scene, started. But I have ideas for others that I would like to do. Puzzles is the area I need to do the most figuring out. You guys may not like when a puzzle takes you 45 min to figure out, but just be glad they don't take as long for you as they do for me :) they literally takes me months!

I'm not going to give a lot more away than I already have with regard to day 12, but I'll give you a roster of confirmed characters. These will be there no matter what: 1-Brooke, 2-Danna, 3-Omar, 4-Araceli. Conditional characters: 1-Tanya, 2-Meg, 3-Sonam, 4-Karli.

Also, Danna will try to crack a nut with her abs. So... take that into consideration.

also

I will not give you a date on when Day 12 will be done. I don't know. I need my day job to settle down before I can make meaningful progress on the game, and that's probably 2 months away. I will be getting some help there in about a week, but still gonna a be an uphill climb for a while.

At any rate, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your February!