Hello folks,

As I'm sure some of you all know there's currently a massive heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. While I got a lot of cool stuff done this week I'm taking this weekend to say cool myself and will likely not get an updated build out on the 27th. I may just delay it til next week so that I can get all the stuff I want in it.

I did get a lot of stuff done within the last 48 hours that I'm really proud of, such as the in-game music, which you can hear below. All I need to do music-wise are a victory and defeat themes and that shouldn't be too bad. I still have some sound effects I want to add, but the audio is like 90% done.

I am extremely proud of this piece! It is adapted from something I wrote around a decade ago, but I heavily changed the melodies and structure. I think the "solos" could be better, but eh! they're good enough. It's all about the bass anyway. I wanted to make sure the piece was about 3 minutes long since that's how long it was generally taking me to finish phase 1.

A thing I just implemented today was a scrollable menu for the Style settings.  This was actually really easy to implement though I don't think I've ever done it before. Basically I just had to draw all the options to a surface and then draw the part of the surface. Getting the exact placement took a bit since I found it kind of mindbending, but once I figured it out, it works like a charm. I still need to add some UI art to make it 100% clear the menu can be scrolled though.

There are really only two major things I have to do. Those are: add the menu for key rebinding, and the final phase of the boss fight. I was hoping to at least start both this week, but ah well. I think the key rebinding should only take a day to do since all I need to do is the menu, really. There is some nuance to it that will likely be a painpoint. Namely, do I let people bind multiple verbs to the same keys and what if they make their keybinding all screwy to the point where the game isn't playable. For this project I'm just not going to let people do the first thing. For the second, well, they can always just delete the settings.ini in their appdata, but that's not good enough. I'll probably implement something that will let you reset everything with a button press or by clicking on something. We'll see.

Phase 3 is going to be the thing that takes the longest and I don't think I'll have it finished by next Sunday. What I have planned is fairly complex compared to the other phases, but it'll be cool so that's fine. I think it's still within my ability though and that's the important part.

I'll be so happy to get this game done and released. It's not getting much attention at all and that's not too surprising. There's been some major game sales and bundles so people aren't really hurting for stuff to check out (though if they're on itch, they probably never are). I haven't been doing a ton of actual marketing outside of posting stuff on twitter and some discords I'm in. I've never been good at marketing, but like I haven't even started to seek out press.

Anyway, this has gone way longer than I expected so I'll end it here. Hope you all are staying cool.