An even poorer DevLog as what regards contents, but more of a rant about how things are going in the Glitch Universe.

Greetings everybody and welcome to another DevLog.

Things haven't been going too well lately, and between University, emotional and physical pain and various events happening, I practically didn't work on Glitch_Heaven at all, or if we shall be more precise: I didn't have the will to do so.

But before the rant begins, let's see the usual list of changes of this month:

• Fixed a crashing bug when a certain glitch was enabled , this was due to a change in the underlying code and the inheriting objects didn't really appreciate it. Curse you Inheritance!
• Added Laser Buttons: Now lasers can work with a timer and/or with a trigger, the triggers always turn off the lasers while the timer turns on and off the laser every # seconds.
• Added a "Game Loading" Screen: Differently from the "loading screens" I mentioned in my previous post , the August 2016 devlog, This triggers immediately after opening the application so you know the game is really started, sadly seems that 90% of the loading time is given by the underlying SDL implementation (PyGame) so most of the time the user will just see a small flashing window and then the menu opens, but it will be useful if I ever decide to pre-load graphics at the Game's Boot.

And that's all, a very very poor DevLog, no updates on the tilemap, no updates on the sound (which will be needed soon), no updates on the music and practically no updates on the code.

Next Up, I'll rant about how things are going in the Glitch Universe.

Here comes the part I decided to write this devlog for.

What's the cause of all this lack of will in doing things? Sadly I don't know precisely, it's a period I'm completely out of energy. Studying for my graduation takes a lot of my time and all the stress around me isn't helping the creative process at all.

People keep telling me that I don't like how Glitch_Heaven is made just because it's my product, and we're negatively biased over what we create, and that's probably true: so much I would like to add to the game, but I can't because of lack of capacity or technical limitations.

Some of them would be, for instance the game somehow reacting to the music that is put in the background, so to make everything less static, but it seems that I can't find a solution about it, and if I get closer to find it, turns out it doesn't work or worse, the package required to do it is incompatible with the license of the game I'm making.

Speedrun mode, which allowed players to challenge each other to see who is the fastest puzzle-solver in the game had to be put aside for multiple reasons, mostly lack of knowledge in network coding and the lack of money to host a server where to keep the scores on, and some other stuff.

A possible solution to some technical limitations would be rewriting the entire game in C++, the most widely used coding language for VideoGames, but that would mean that I have to learn SDL for C++ (even though I'm more leaning towards SFML for some reason) which is obviously different from PyGame, I would need to rewrite Richard Jones's TMX library in C++ or find a library able to load TMX maps and give me a somewhat comparable comfort in coding.

Obviously rewriting over 5000 lines of code in a language that I can't say I know as well as I know Python 3 is a titanic work for me, which leaves me stuck between a rock and a hard place: keep going with Python 3 and somehow guarantee cross-platform compatibility or switch to C++ and have a whole new range of possibilities but also a whole new selection of challenges to overtake, cross-platform compatility being one of the many.

I feel the whole product is absolutely sub-par over something well-built as are the now known hit indie games like Stardew Valley, which was made by one developer, by the way. Even though this is my first seriously-made game, I can't help but being the harshest critic over my own work, and feeling like this game is absolutely unappealing.

So Glitch_Heaven is not doing good, it's spitting blood and it's very sick, metaphorically speaking; so I need to take a good break from the whole make-a-game thing and take a little bit more care of myself, as a great mind said: "If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of your game".

And as a side note regarding this quote I'd like to thank the whole Gamkedo Community for the great suggestions and the will to answer my silly questions, you people are great.

The game project won't be abandoned, just put aside for a little bit. No freaking out.

Thanks for reading this long rant, and please take care of yourselves.

Penaz