Stage 2’s world design and event design are finished, and I can start building the levels. I also made music for the Demo 2.0 trailer. During the prologue, when I was still getting used to Cakewalk again and things felt awkward, I bought vocal stems for the first time and made a track – this time I reused those same stems to create something new. Writing a new song from scratch is fun, but it’s also enjoyable to buy vocal stems, reinterpret them, and create within those constraints.
There was a weird issue where the demo wouldn’t run properly the first time but would work fine from the second launch onwards. To try to fix this, I cleaned up the engine and did a fresh build today. Then I opened the editor and, oh my god, the props I’d placed were broken. Many had moved to the origin point, and all the auto-placed props were reset and needed to be refreshed. I was mentally checked out for about an hour before I came back. The silver lining is that gameplay-related stuff was saved in a separate sublevel and seems unaffected. Thinking back, I split a sublevel in two while making the Lotus One hallucination event in the plaza. During the split, when trying to move linked objects, there were cases where it asked “move even though the link will break?” When I clicked no, there was an editor bug that duplicated all the actors I was trying to move right in place. I discovered this later and manually found and deleted the duplicates one by one, but something must have gone wrong in that process… Even if I wanted to rollback, I don’t know which build to rollback to. In the end, I decided to just check all 50 sublevels one by one. Well, might as well use this as meditation time while cleaning up levels… but still, ugh… Back in the day I would’ve been devastated, but after making games solo for a few years, I guess I’ve gotten stronger – I was just flustered for about an hour, then played with my dog and felt better. Ah, I was planning to leisurely work on stages and events while gradually making a trailer, but… well.