Snow Clump

Added the sun and moon to the sky (and surfaces that reflect it, like windows and bodies of water). The moon also shows different phases depending on the time of month.

I teased this on my Discord, but I finished Siouxsie's summer outfit too!

It's something I had planned for awhile, but I spent today writing systems to allow Siouxsie to change into her work uniform to cover up her tattoos when she's on the clock at Ramen-ya ATSUI.

Juliette's fall outfit!

I just checked and 12K wishlists, so thank you all !! Only 1 DAU, but the game has Acai as a fruit tree now, so I consider this weekend a success

After working on some tropical fruits suggested by my Discord, my girlfriend, who often has, hmm... "creative" ideas, said I should add a "Durian that you can make into a weapon." While I haven't added a "stink gun" (???), as she suggested, I thought Durian would be fun to add.

I made some changes to how farm animals produce items. It's no longer a "this or that" situation, so some animals, like sheep, can produce multiple types of items at once (wool and sheep milk). Sheep milk can then be used to make Pecorino Cheese !!

Since the game takes place in the city, it didn't really make sense for the player to be building old rickety windmills, but I still liked the idea of having something you could build on your garden plots that would have some ambient motion, so I came up with these buildable wind turbines.

Worked a bit decorating the Marin Shores Aquarium today.

Quack

This past week, I celebrated my birthday! Secretly, I was hoping to have the game out by now, but I was happy to have enjoyed both my first camping trip in decades and some fanart from my longtime friend/collaborator instagram.com/lia_pchan/ instead.

I wrapped up Juliette's Summer outfit and her second event !! She starts out a little mean and more than a little judgy, but I'm hoping people stick it through with her!

I've hit 100k wishlists on Steam !! Thank you all for your support !! I'm open for questions about the game if you've got any !!

With some help of my Discord, I worked out Juliette's outfit in summer !!

I've been spending some time working on bird stuff. You'll be able to identify when certain birds are nearby by listening closely to the ambient noise! (birders, feel free to school me if that's not at all how cardinals sound irl)

Just a little work on how waterfalls get rendered ingame! I apply a little scaling near the top of the waterfall for the illusion of perspective, and so that it looks like the water is getting faster as it falls further downward.

After a week break, I returned to wrap up the animation for my splash screen!

Oh, deer!

I've had a Talent in the game to show how NPCs respond to gifts you've given them in the past, but it was kinda tucked in an easily ignored UI element. I think it's much easier to parse this way !!

I was just noodling with some music and was trying to write a theme for the Museum, but I think it ended up fitting in better with Phoebe's character. Here's her first friendship event with the music and all of the new character emotes I've been working on !!

Spent the day putting the finishing touches on her portrait and in-world sprite! Here she is ingame!

WIP of Hildegard (Hilde), who maintains the Apollo City Museum !! There're still a lot of details I've gotta fill out in her artwork, but it's been super fun working on characters again, since it's my favorite part of games like these.

FINALLY wrapped up the first draft of the ingame map. The map is drawn to scale, so NPCs are positioned exactly on the map as they are in the game world (with some logic to "group" nearby NPCs together so that you don't have a bunch of overlapping icons).

Recently I've been all over the place in terms of work on Sunkissed City, but one thing I can share is that I've added more of those cute Animal Crossing-y reactions/emotes to the game, which I've been peppering into the game's friendship events!

Worked a little bit on the farm animal movement! Baby animals, like chicks, follow adults, but also, if you've nurtured an animal's friendship high enough, it'll approach you when you get close and follow you around too !!

Of course I'd be stuck at this number instead of the cool next one...

A rough draft at sheep 🥰

As a rain lover myself I can't relate, but riff-raff NPCs'll walk around with umbrellas.

I had this "feature" written on my "to-do" whiteboard for the longest time and boy did it feel great to finally wipe off !!

I took a break for the holidays, but I'm back to work! There've been huge improvements behind the scenes (I've been making big gains FPS-wise with my UI code), but it's easier to show off the new neon lights in Old Apollo and riff-raff NPCs sometimes saying stuff!

A little social fluff specifically for people to play with in multiplayer -- you can buy wrapping paper and make little personalized gift boxes you can surprise your friends with. Happy holidays, everyone!!

Was happy to be able to drop in the nice parallaxed scene from the top of Pinnacle Peak into the end of day menus to spruce them up a bit!

When I was working on SDV 1.5, I once prototyped the ability for NPCs to explore your farm (though I never finished the feature). In Sunkissed City, as you gain friendship with NPCs, they'll visit your gardens and if they join your little plant punk collective, even help out!

I posted about the view from the top of Pinnacle Peak a few days ago and figured people might wanna see an update!

For the longest time, ponytails and buns were their own hairstyles, but now they're modular parts that you can add to any of the customizable styles in the game (in addition to bangs and "sides"). More excitingly though, you can blend your hair color using the new ombré option!!

Hey everyone! Wanted to formally announce that Sunkissed City is looking like an early 2025 release as opposed to my original Q4 2024 estimate 😅💀💀💀

I also got around to making the load screen not just be a black screen with a white bar on it. it'll show photos you've taken using the ingame camera! I'll have to clean up the art a considerable amount, but I think it's kind of a fun way of reminding the player of their journey!

It's not finished, but I'm working on the vista from the top of Pinnacle Peak. When I was driving to our friends' place for Thanksgiving, I was struck by how cool Mount Rainier looked in the distance and thought "hey, that should be in the game..."

I also revisited Siouxsie's portrait. She's the one character I've had the most trouble nailing down the portrait for, but I think I'm finally at a place where I feel like her personality and her portrait line up !!

A free wheeling convo on the Discord led to the topic of pizza rat (remember that?) which led to... well, other "dudes" that live in the sewers that love pizza, which led to me remembering that I was going to add nunchucks to the game. And now the game has flail type weapons!

I was on the fence about sharing this, since it's an early game spoiler for Camilliflow-- er, Camille's backstory, but I thought it was cute, so here's Camille's 3 heart event!

The UI needs a little bit more art polish, but the item upgrading is feeling pretty fun already! It can be used to upgrade weapons and armor using a variety of items in the game to grant them debilitating effects, buff their attributes, among other things!

Whoops, sorry about the expired link to the Sunkissed City discord! (I told you, I'm new to this), here's one that doesn't expire: discord.com/invite/kuBAY...

Took a break from code to unwind by going through some of my art books. I found some inspiration for some cute winter outfits for Camille and Juliette, which is good for Camille because she'd been standing around in the snow in cut-off jeans...

discord.gg/vfEpDr3w Apologies for not keeping up on here -- the video size limit was kind of tough to deal with. With that said, if you're a Discord user, I'm pretty active on my new Discord server!

Finally got around to giving Yoh his tagging animations. Just another clicka-clacka, I guess!

Just got access to video posting on Bluesky, so I'll repost the video I posted on Twitter here too! Moving forward, I'll try my best to make sure to post on both platforms for everyone wanting to see my game progress who don't have access to the platform!