I am finally back baby!

After a very long hiatus as I sought out treatment for mental health issues that were preventing me from having the energy to do the things I liked. I am at a place where I have the energy and am working with my care team on trying to improve my focus to ensure I can stay on more long term projects. There has not been any changes or updates to the game over this hiatus, but the break did give me some time to think and do some research on making my process better for my brain. 

I was first going in by just doing what my brain felt like doing for the day: art sounds nice so lets draw some bugs for the title screens, I wanna get this random mechanic working so that's do that, etc. The issue with this approach is that for a single action I would have to do the thinking and the implementing which exhausts me more easily and puts me of of doing a task. I am going to peel back and plan out this game to the best of my ability.  To start out I used a tutorial that lets you edit Godot/GDScript in VScode an then integrate git as well for versioning as well as remote capability (can work edit the code with any place where I can access Github/git, and actually work on scenes anywhere that I can get Godot/VScode). This will help me work on it mobile on my laptop and still be able to sync the game with current progress, not to mention versioning so that I do not lose any useful code if I were to screw something up. The next step for me is going to be filling out a game deisgn document with a vision board of what I want the game to be. In short I want it to be an entmology/oddity tycoon where the player's main goal is to pay their student loans and invest in their education/location to reach their goal as a Professor or Research associate in the PNW.

After playing some lovely demos during steam next fest I realized I wanted the game to be more akin to those blacksmith tycoons that were all the rage on sites like CoolMathGames. I want the player to be free to decorate the items as they wish with some regard to technique and cost. I played a lovely game called CraftCraft which did have a section in which you are building an organic crown out of materials collected. This gave you free reign on the materials but scored you based on  how well you fit them in the chosen schematic. I could combine this system with the questing/messaging feature in Sticky Business to allows a player to work on custom commissions, while keeping a back stock on various cheaper pieces.

With that all being said I am excited to be back in this project, and hope you follow along for future updates!

Brain Dump:

- Each class could unlock new techniques or insects of varying difficulty

- Still thinking if I want the player to physically catch/farm the live specimens