Entropic Float 2: Land Of The Witch

February Update: Month's Targets Exceeded! Onto The Next!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Feb 24, 2025 at 12:19:04 PM

Hello! It’s time for the February update, and I’ve made lots of progress!

Let’s start things off by revisiting the goals I laid out a month ago:

Find the notebook where I wrote down location flowcharts. I somehow lost this in my apartment somewhere. I need to know the order of things! - I did, in fact, find this notebook! It was in a shelf, underneath my Kagamine Len Ita Bag.

^ Sketch the remaining BGs needed for Area 2, once I know exactly what I planned for those to be. - I sketched them! I then also lined, colored, and shaded them! All the backgrounds needed for Area 2 are ready to use!

Implement Area 1’s Pizzeria Minigame - This is the first place The Possum will appear~ - The minigame is implemented! You can make and receive a pepperoni pizza! You can also screw up making the pizza and get a consolation prize instead!

Add a GUI element showing which allies are currently recruited. - This is done! It only took about an hour!

So, as you can see, I didn’t just accomplish my goals for February- I exceeded them! Hurray! Area 2 is prepped to begin implementation. Besides this, I’ve also added another 7,000 words to the game since last time- Not even on writing full-blown scenes, just implementing more character reactions to being shown Objekts. There are currently 8 objekts fully implemented with methods to obtain them and inventory icons, and 9 more that are coded in with visuals in the works. Nowhere near all of them, but I’ll probably wait to add more to the list until I’ve written in the reactions for each character being added into Area 2. Best take things incrementally!

It won’t be very long till I update again, but here are the goals I have for the next couple weeks:

Create the assets for and implement a Zone (Character-Thematic Minigame) for Area 1, so a piece of Evidence can be acquired with which to open Area 2
Make travel throughout Area 2 Possible
Add characters into Area 2

And some further goals to have done by the second March update, but which I’ll get started on if I finish the above:
Add Objekts into Area 2
Sketch backgrounds needed for Area 3 (Six more than I already have prepped or sketched)
Create a map for the ‘Tony’s Rides’ function

And that’s about it! On other platforms, I'll be starting to update twice a month- To avoid clogging your emails and feed here, I'll still post just once a month, combining the contents of both updates. For more frequency, socials are the way! Thank you for reading!
 

January Update: Talksprites Completed! Back To Coding!
over 1 year ago – Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 04:44:04 AM

Hello everybody!

It’s time for the January Update, and this month so far has definitely not been the greatest. On the fourth day of the year, I crashed my car in a parking lot because I pushed my limits too far work-wise, and I’ve had to spend a lot of time since then dealing with it. It’s pretty much sorted out now, but it’s been very stressful.

But even with that big complication in my daily life, I have some notable dev updates to share!

The talksprites are complete! You heard me- Every talksprite that I had planned now exists, and if any more end up needing to be drawn, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. But the 77 sprites are here! That represents 5 unique talksprites for each main character and 3 for each notable side character. I actually finished drawing these before 2025 began~

So, what have I been up to since the year started, besides dealing with my personal life? A whole lot, actually!

I haven’t tackled any further visual assets since completing the talksprites, but I’ve been very busy. With every talksprite available to me, I’m finally able to write with clarity- That’s taken the form of about 10,000 words more than were included in the demo, just for a start! And those 10,000 words just come from flights of fancy, moments where I felt immediately inspired to fill in the contents of functional code. Because functional code is most of what I’ve added!

Why did I need the talksprites done before approaching these code frameworks fully…? Well, I’m not exactly sure, but it definitely has been helping. The randomization process and the ally system are both fully coded in now! That’s right, we’ve broken out of the demo’s focus on Loop One. It’s now entirely possible to bring a friend along with you, die, then get a different friend! And everybody else in Area 1 will acknowledge the friend, too~
 

I have decided to slightly postpone upgrading from monthly updates to biweekly ones until after February, mainly because February is a short month in which I will be spending very little time in my own home, and I need to spend a portion of it stepping off to the side to work on my other main artistic venture- I have commissions to complete and some designs to finalize over in the Fan Niche. That’s my online shop, if you didn’t know, and you can buy Entropic Float merch there among plenty of other things!
 

Basically, I don’t expect to have enough done at two separate points of February to warrant updating- I’ll just update around the 20th again. But March? March will bring updates on the 8th and on the 22nd! And in the meantime, it isn’t like I expect to get nothing done in February overall. Here’s the goals I’ve got for the month ahead!
 

Find the notebook where I wrote down location flowcharts. I somehow lost this in my apartment somewhere. I need to know the order of things!

^ Sketch the remaining BGs needed for Area 2, once I know exactly what I planned for those to be.

Implement Area 1’s Pizzeria Minigame - This is the first place The Possum will appear~

Add a GUI element showing which allies are currently recruited.
 

Let’s see how that goes! I’ll keep you posted. As usual, you can find more frequent updates in the discord server, and thank you for reading!

Entropic Float 2: December Update!
over 1 year ago – Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 07:49:01 AM

Hello everybody!

It’s been a while since the last update. I did say you probably wouldn’t hear from me again until about now! October and November have come and gone, and with them, plenty of progress.

For October- I didn’t quite hit the goal that I set, of reaching a certain number of talksprites completed before the end of the month. I hoped to reach 80% of talksprites ready to go, but only made it up to 74% - In part because I misjudged how much time I had to begin with, and in part because I failed to account for certain days of limited access to my desktop computer. I completed 10 more sprites after the October update, not the hoped-for 15 more. Though, if it counts for anything, there are 3 more sprites which reached a partially-completed state before the month ended!  We’re at a nice round 20 talksprites left to complete at the moment.

When it comes to November, I was able to accomplish exactly the goal I set out to- 50,000 words written, all of them for Entropic Float 2’s memory-seeking segments! This doesn’t represent every single memory by any means, but it does make a substantial dent. This month also brought with it some more partial progress, beginning while not yet completing several more visual assets in the few days between completing the NaNo challenge and November’s end.

What’s on deck for December? Well, there are holidays, and with them, several angles to consider. Working on gifts has already delayed me posting this update, in fact! It’s a busy season for an etsy shop, and time enjoyed with family is necessarily time spent away from the desktop computer on which the biggest steps in game development are made. So, I’d rather not commit to too many goals with an unpredictable month ahead! I’m hoping to finally get the EF2 demo onto steam and complete a few talksprites. Beyond that, I’ll surprise myself and you all with whatever I’m able to get done.

Oh, and going into 2025 - I’ll make the January update about halfway through the month, like this one, then in February begin making the same sort of biweekly updates as I did for the first game, including progress bars. These will mainly be across our various platforms, I’ll actually be easing off of updating on the Kickstarter page except for major developments. Enough of what EF2 needs is finally coming together enough to say “It’s this far along” in any meaningful way.

Thank you, as always, for reading. See you next time!

October Update- Spooky Bundles and Formalized Progress!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Oct 08, 2024 at 05:59:14 AM

Entropic Float is featured once again in the Halloween Queer Stories Bundle- And if you haven’t grabbed yourself the Beloved Ghost DLC yet, it holds the elusive title as the one DLC in the bundle too! Support me and a whole bunch of other wonderful gamedevs with this mutual aid bundle, available at a suggested supporter price or a discounted price- Choose what you can afford! People both behind and included in this bundle were incredibly helpful with the Kickstarter nearly a year ago now, so show them some love!

On to the updates! When it comes to what I said I’d be getting done throughout September- I got the apparel photographed and posted, and the housekeeping updates pushed! These ended up basically being my September Update, since I shared the info about both at once. As for getting the EF2 demo onto steam- I made the small text edits necessary in the demo itself (as info about Kickstarter in the itch demo release is no longer relevant) but have yet to actually get it posted. Frankly, Steam confuses me at the best of times, it’s an intimidating task, and difficult to be motivated to overcome when the demo is and has been available on itch. We’ll get there.

Meanwhile when it comes to getting there, visual assets! While I’ve been working on them across the board for a while now, I finally had the opportunity to sit down and formalize the process a bit more. Up to now, I’ve been balancing in a lot of directions, and as a result, have just been fitting in what work I can. A lot of progress has been made without taking time to set up a way to measure that progress- So I can now say that we have 60% of planned talksprites completed! Here are a few of the latest ones.

Since talksprites will be used throughout the entire game, not having them all yet has served as the biggest roadblock to making proper progress on the game itself… That and everyday life of course, but point being, the more talksprite sets I finish the quicker implementation will go. While progress may look different than I expected it would based on my experience with the first game, I would still say that development is on track! It’s just on a different track than I realized it would be on. All is well!

My hope is to get up to at least 80% talksprites before the end of the month- That’ll be fifteen more, which isn’t a very daunting number if it’s the main thing I’m working on in my free time! All of my weekends this month are accounted for by some extra work I’ve picked up, but I have my ways of squeezing art in. I might not make another update until late November, but if you join the discord, I share all but the most spoilerific talksprites there as I finish them!

And what does November hold? Well, despite NaNoWriMo as an institution making some questionable decisions as of late… I’ve been participating in the event for over ten years and it’s become an important part of my creative process, so while I’m unlikely to track it on the official website this year- I’ll be writing. Memory seeking segments, to be specific, since those don’t use talksprites anyway! 50,000 words or more in the month of November, that’s still my goal. And that’s all for now!

Thank you for reading, and look forward to more big strides in development coming up!

August Update- Making Progress, More To Come!
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 09:26:50 AM

Well- July got away from me, but I did warn you all that could happen... Turns out that working two part-time jobs, running a small business, and near-solo developing a game all at once can be tough to juggle, who knew? (I knew, that's why I've been upfront about it all.)

Even so- Falling short in the project manager portion of indie development, with no July update, doesn't mean that I'm falling short in other areas! Here we have a portion of the sketches I've been putting together for some Objekts and CGs...

And some talksprites since the last update...

And, what the heck, how about a preview for one of shoii's CGs?? (Speaking of shoii, if you didn't hear, they've switched twitter accounts to "shoeechee")

Progress continues to be made~ In addition to keeping up the new art, there are a few specific tasks I have on deck for September. Photographing and making available the new apparel line, finally getting the EF2 demo up on steam, and pushing some housekeeping updates to various platforms. Nothing too exciting, but after a summer like this one, it needs to be done!

Until next time! Thank you, as always, for reading!