Hey, long time no see! A full year since last entry.

Kind of a weird year. I started freelancing as a web-developer so now I've been working from home, and it's surprisingly nice, although a little monotonous, but the positives far outweighs the negatives so I'm sticking to it. Also, I got a new cluster headache attack which, again, lasted three full months, and man, I really I don't wish that to anybody. Finally, I realized that, even though I'm not overweight, I was in terrible shape, so I decided to exercise more by buying a bicycle, and man, walking to the store was some damn good exercise.

Of course buying a bicycle was not enough, I also had to use it, and I guess I started way too enthusiastically because on my first month riding the bike, after riding for over an hour, I passed out in the middle of the night near my home. I woke up on the floor with the bike next to me, and some dude came, asked me if I was OK and said: "man, your face looks fucked up!". I got home, went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and, surprise, half my face was covered in blood. I basically faceplanted the floor with all my body weight while moving at (thankfully, low) speed, I'm lucky I didn't lose any teeth.

The next day my mother saw me and was totally convinced that I got into a fight: "No, I'm telling you, I passed out while on the bike!" - "You're lying to me". It took a while to convince her.

Besides that little incident, using the bike has done wonders, I don't get tired as easily now. I'm still in bad shape though, but not as bad as before.

Oh, and yeah, I've been working on the paper game. Sloooooooowly.

It kinda looks the same as before, but I added some particle effects, I cleaned up a little bit the HUD, I added ammo pickups (no more infinite bullets anymore), changed some colors to more "cheerful" ones, added some quality of life improvements like checkpoints and item indicators, phew, lots of stuff.

Here's a little GIF showing some stuff. I have no idea how to embed Gfycat, so I'll just leave the link: https://gfycat.com/GracefulFlimsyAustraliansilkyterrier

As you can see, particles fly everywhere. Oh, and I also made seeker missiles, which took me more time to implement that I'm willing to admit.

Yay, rain effect! It doesn't make a single bit of sense with the art style, but eh!

A ransom note generator! Useful for the mission titles, the game logo and stuff like that. Apparently it can also be used to make ransom notes, but don't quote me on this.

Besides the above, I also wrote the outline of the story and how the missions will play out, but I still need to write the details, like define the personalities of the characters, write all the dialogue, things like that. Writing is surprisingly difficult to do, I've never done it before.

Finally, a few months ago I uploaded a gameplay video showing a full, although short, level:

This it how I want the final game to be: big maps with multiple objectives that you can do in any order while managing your ammo, health and fuel. It's an homage to the Strike series after all.

This has been the closest I have ever been to making a game after many abandoned projects. I still don't know if I'll ever finish it, but I'm happy with the attempt so far, and surprisingly, I haven't lost interest in the project yet, so I guess I'll just keep at it.

Thanks for reading!