#aster boredom simulator devlog

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in the meantime chipping away at aster's animations. im over halfway done with them for sure, just two more sets of anims for the three of them.

don't want to give too much away so quickly, even though im Excited to see them come to life. i want the experience to be kind of like watching a fish tank, besides listening in on chats.

i feel at ease at least showing these static images though

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finally powered though the peepsqueaks animation. which also means im Almost done with the graphical part of it all, it should be all smooth sailing from here.

of course there's also the speech balloon that's necessary for the Experience™, but that's technically a separate part from the ghost.

once im done with the remaining graphics the updates are going to significantly slow down since the writing will gradually uncover itself. at least that's the intended experience.

(joke logo, ill decide on the graphics yet)

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IT BEGINS

how it started

how's it going

officially starting work on a third CaelOS ukagaka. this one will be more just focused on conversations between urs and aster without player's personal involvement.

my idea is to treat the ukgk medium as more of a simple visual novel engine rather than a character on your dekstop, so it'll work Vastly differently from assistant and terror star. but i hope it'll be still fun to explore

(and of course just to be able to watch aster walk around and idle.)

that red hopping dot will Eventually be Aster. needless to say it won't be nearly as rapid, i just needed to make sure that the animation code works as intended. taking a break for now though, that'll be a whole lot of small drawings down the line

btw since as usual for my shell making everything is much smaller on export, also want to show the whole laptop, im very proud of how it came out

(fun fact: this chat client was spontaneously dubbed Sputnik in the middle of drawing the taskbar icon. the speech balloon will be largely styled after it)

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[ video demonstrating CaelOS' startup sound, error sound, and notification sound ]

for once a demo that's not completely silent!! can you believe i can make simple sounds!!!

idk if these will get changed up or tweaked but im happy with how these came out

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i think we can consider the graphical part of boredom simulator finished. the base part of it at least, because there may be a little more to it during the writing stage of it :3c

for now these frames are empty but they'll be filled in with "photos" to accompany the story as necessary. i think that will be a fun compensation for otherwise lack of expressions the ghost has.

they also are in sync with color schemes of aster's aspects!

so this is about the ghost's shell. one more part of the visual design was to make the balloon, which is technically separate entity from a ghost. i wanted it to basically be basically like pop-up notifications for the messenger window, and i think i have managed to nail the aesthetic fairly well

i already had the icons made earlier so the process of making them was smooth sailing. im actually really proud of how it came out, so i've also made a decision to release a less ghost tailored version of it early. my ghost making process is kind of a marathon so it'll be just keeping it private for no reason whatsoever.

(they Are rather big though... not out of the question i may scale it down a little. also no, the four balloons won't be visible all at once ever, at least not if i decide to go through with that)

so we finally get to the writing. for now im setting down the rules and characterization goals to follow to keep the characters consistent. i can give away though that the conversations take place way before Assistant Software and Terror Star.

thanks for following along so far! <3 i may show off bits of progress here and there from now on but it'll be definitely a lot less frequent.

and now i work on getting out of the artblock...

oh but. just one more little thing:

one Extra Thing to the shell did end up a little labor intensive, so im trying Very Hard (and already failed. if you saw the full thing on bluesky no you didn't) to keep under wraps.

i hope it'll be a nice surprise when users inevitably find this within the finished ghost...

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bit more progress on the new ghost project. since the main medium of conversations will be the through a messenger it only makes sense the four involved have individual icons made for them

it's probably worth posting them as is since you're absolutely not seeing them at this resolution in the final thing. they'll be seen as a bit larger than that in the speech balloons though.

also! getting started on aster's animations. or at least preparing for them because im gonna have to make them in less conventional way to make sure this doesn't take forever

on another note, didn't take me too long to come up with what the project will be actually called. for now settled on Aster™ Boredom Simulator, both to fit the naming convention of the other two ghosts, and also because it's fucking funny