Version 60 is rapidly approaching from a distance (Patreon)

Hello! Progress on Version 60 has been great, and it feels like it began with a head start. The only thing I haven't puzzled out for Version 60 is what the new creatures will be.

Something that happens when you hit a long, successful streak is that your past successes start to stack against you, and you can fall into the trap of trying to replicate those successes or feeling discouraged when you fall short of the standard. Then you begin to believe you're running out ideas or just "lost" some kind of magic, causing you to lose faith in yourself. I've been feeling this way after the butler and kidnapper fox were received as annoying and unfair (and to some extent the Cruiser, although that's more understandable). But I will keep going as I did before and remember that nothing is unsalvageable. I've never worked on a project long enough for there to be this division between the "old" and the "new", and sometimes it can feel as if I am tacking something onto a classic and trying to pass it off as part of the original. I really don't know if it's possible to get rid of this feeling.

At least on top of this crack in my confidence, I have a defiant spark in my personality that makes me highly motivated by proving anyone or anything wrong; so if you looked inside my head to see what kind of story it's spinning up, you would see me constantly preparing for some kind of "comeback" over and over again, even if I've been doing great the whole time.

But anyways, most of what I've done for Version 60 is actually easy stuff for me, and I am pretty happy with it. I ran a playtest of it yesterday and was excited with the results. It's kind of at the stage where I've done the broad strokes, and there are now many, many little details and additions it needs to be brought to completion. I'm just focusing on not losing my momentum.

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Rather than spilling the beans, I have some more progress photos from older times that I have forgotten about!:

I had a hard time modelling the Kidnapper fox's body and tried about every technique I know before I just figured it out by brute force attempts.

Here are some prototyped/blocked out tiles for the factory that I found lying around. I previously used Probuilder to block things out in Unity, sometimes exporting it to Blender before then converting it back into a Probuilder mesh to mess with the UV's in Unity. When I began working on the mansion, I fully moved my workflow to Blender. I found that a pretty difficult transition at the time, but now I'm pretty happy I did it.

The server room

Fitting the stairs into this single tile was almost impossible. It just barely works without feeling too cramped.

This crazy tile never really had a "block-out" phase, as I just drew the blueprint and then modelled it. I still see it as a lucky feat of engineering, as people thought I had added like 6 new tiles in, when really it was just one tile with many combinations of entrances and exits. Of all the work I've done on interiors, this tile did the best job at hiding the fact that everything is locked to a "tile"/grid system, despite the fact that it is really just a 2x2 size square.