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We have the best soundtrack in the world!

You can check out some game info and the entire Rorasuketo soundtrack by Michael Chadwick here . It's absolutely divine. When I said I wanted to pay homage to the Super Nintendo games of my youth, he went to town and grabbed some soundfonts from games like Final Fantasy IV, Earthbound, and Battletoads . I am so happy with the results. The battle tracks are head-bangers, and the emotional lows are perfectly bittersweet. I wouldn't change a thing. I've known Mike since the boom days of of LiveJournal  — which is a long time, for the kids following along at home. He's an immensely skilled guitarist and songwriter, and has a really impressive catalog of work . Originally, I was going to write the music myself, but Mike has far more experience. And in creative projects like this, doing everything yourself has the potential to turn out an inbred, constipated piece of art. Collaboration adds depth to the work that you might not have realized before. It lightens the workload....
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Sail on in my memory...

Sometimes it's nice to have a friend looking out for you! (Even if they're not perfect in their execution.) There will be a series of images over the end credits. I'm hoping they'll be really special. My work is in an as-needed service, so there is usually some degree of downtime waiting for something to happen. It's hard to say what a day will bring. Busy? Slow? There are guesses, but no guarantees. So I theoretically have time to make progress on  Rora  at work - but I prefer to do art instead of hashing out the actual gameplay. I feel like if I'm interrupted in the middle of programming and spend an hour or two away on another task, I'll forget what I was doing. As it stands, there's a few pieces of art left to do. So this is a fine use of my time. I'm trying to make something really magical happen, and it's a 99.99% chance it won't come to fruition. But if that 0.01% chance comes around, I will literally cry with happiness. That's all...
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Arrow minigame!

I spent way too long banging my head against the way yesterday, trying to figure out why the game wasn't receiving button inputs, only to find out that I had a switch turning on and off while an NPC was moving in the background. I can't remember what it was I was trying to do when I originally placed that NPC on the map. Did that switch do something originally, and why did I change it to do something else later? Do I have a switch doing double duty somewhere else? And that's why you need to keep your switches organized, kids. Anyway, I'm channeling a little Dance Dance Revolution with my arrows here, which I have no qualms about. You're not an ordinary fella!     I'm contemplating doing another webcast soon to keep me accountable. Summer is rocketing along and I need to tap these days to the maximum.
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Little surfer girl.

    I once had a teammate who was a jorts enthusiast, so I figured I needed at least one enemy sprite sporting a pair. ("There are dozens of us!") This particular skater is from our west coast team as well, so I thought I'd have her doing a bit of a surfing pose. I enjoyed working the colors and lighting on this one!
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The skate queen.

 Just a little enemy sprite to keep things rolling. I could never "open up" and skate with my feet at 180 degrees. This is one spry derby girl!
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A slow crawl.

It's been a minute. First it was D&D, then it was finals, then it was an art project that sprung from a divinely fertile fount that could not be ignored, then it was moving house, and now it's a  very  intense botany course where I need to know 175 specimens in the span of 3 weeks. Someday, things will calm down. But for now... Rosaceae! Apiaceae! Brassicaceae! Rorasuketo is on the back burner, but it's still alive, and I still plan on finishing it this year. More TBA.
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Buds and blooms.

Finals week is right around the corner, and while this humble scholar has an optimistic lookout for April (go on! ask me about glycolysis!), the first few weeks of May could be complicated. A common pitfall for new college students is not recognizing that most summer classes run at an accelerated rate. Having been around the block a few times, I signed up for a 3-credit summer course expecting the accelerated six weeks, only to discover it is  double- accelerated. That's one college credit per  week . It's a plant identification course, so I assume it's timed this way for maximum efficiency in the field. I predict I will exit May either loving plants or despising them. Winter vacation is when I historically do most of my work for  Rora , with spring break in second, and summer is a bit of a wild card. My official goal is to finish the game by the end of this year, but my unofficial goal is to finish it by the end of the summer. With beta testing and all that, we'll s...
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New area: Cemetery.

It has been a strange week. There was a death in my family, and it's a complicated one, so loss is on my mind. There is a sort of "empty chair" exercise at the front end of the game where you have the opportunity to talk to someone who has hurt you. Now that the person I envisioned in that exercise is gone, I decided to tag a graveyard on the back end so the player can speak to someone they've lost - whether it's someone with whom they had a good or not-so-good relationship. I'm all about the catharsis. I've considered both a setting from my childhood and a graveyard for other projects - but added them to  Rorasuketo . Maybe I will get around to those other projects someday, but the areas are nice to have in here, too, just in case they don't manifest otherwise. I've been canvassing my city, and one of the themes I'm advertising is that it's a game about mental health recovery. There are times I've wondered if that's a good idea. I ...
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