Status Update, September 2025

Overview

• Shinmera: went on holidays to Sapporo

• Shinmera: got COVID and recovered

• Shinmera: started university

• Shinmera: drew 43 comic pages

• Domolutz: finished the intro cutscene animation

• Karlosz: various performance improvements for Kandria

Some Details

Well, hello! As you can tell from the overview, this month was somewhat dry on work being done from my side. I'm still trying to figure out how to balance university work and everything else, too, so October is bound to look rather similar, I'm afraid.

Still, Dominic got some great work done and we now have the intro cutscene mostly done. You can see a pre visualisation of it on YouTube here: (CW: screaming and sobbing, blood)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm3Mr4gn_3s

The mixing and sound effects and music and all are very much temporary placeholder, and there's more work left to be done to make the lip sync better, too, but that can wait for a bit.

For now there's plenty of work left stacked up for me -- I need to get the cutscene into the engine and actually working correctly, which is trickier than it might seem. Voice lines need to match up precisely with the animation playback, and multiple rigs need to animate in tandem for the cutscene to play correctly.

Then I also need to implement the behaviour of the first boss enemy that Dominic finished animating last month, and work on the level design to finish up all the areas of Act 1.

In between university work that is now ramping up as well, I'm honestly not sure how quickly I'll be able to tackle all of these tasks. There's also a new funding project from Zürich for games that just opened up, and I'll have to see about submitting some projects for that, which means making grant proposal documents and everything.

Charles has been doing good work optimising Kandria, and it now runs at 60 FPS.... for the most part. There's some very heavy hitches still when new dispatch functions are compiled in though, which I think are bad enough to make the game unsubmittable for certification. I'm as of yet unsure how to fix that issue, or in the very least make it less egregious.

Charles is also out of time for the project for now, and has landed a new job in Berlin, so I'm sure he'll be busy with moving and prepping for that and so on.

I suppose I should also talk about my holidays in Sapporo! The flights were absolutely horrendous with the long layover and everything, but the stay in Sapporo was quite nice. The temperatures were still a bit too high for my liking, but I was able to successfully disconnect from work and just focus on relaxing and drawing comics.

Here's some photos:

Upon returning from Sapporo though I got slammed with Covid for over a week. That also made me miss the first week of university, so I've been off to a great start 🫠

I'm all recovered now, but as mentioned, getting accustomed to the university student life again is going to take some time.

In any case, I'll keep you updated with how I'm doing next month!

— Love, Shinmera ❤️