Yet Another Aquatic Release

Every single post this month thus far has been a release, and this post is no exception. Let's get to it, shall we?

The first release is a breed, albeit one that isn't quite as complex as some of my other ones.

The Swimming Aqua Grendels are...well, Aqua Grendels that can swim. That said, they do have some differences from the normal variety besides the obvious - chief among them are the swim bladder edits from the Astro Tetras.

Download the Swimming Aqua Grendels!

The next release is quite a bit more significant. 

I've been talking about the Sea Garden for quite a while, and decided it was about time to do more than that. Since the full pack is taking forever to finish, I decided to release it in parts. 

Part one consists of two plants: the Sea Pen and the Coralroot. The sea pen provides creatures with an underwater source of fruit, while the coralroot does the same for food. With these, the lack of aquatic fruit (and too a lesser extent food) has been addressed. The coralroot has the bonus of providing aquatic creatures with entertainment once it's been eaten. 

Download the Sea Garden Pack One!

So, is that all the releases for this month? Nope - my birthday's coming up within five days, and just like last year there's going to be a breed release for that too. In fact, since it's my 21st, the swarm of releases is a bit of a preliminary celebration. Stay tuned; there's more to come.

Status Update

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I've gone back to being on hiatus again, for the usual reasons (lack of interest, reality's getting in the way, etc.) As such, I feel I should probably say something about the state of my projects.

First off: The Sea Garden. I'm sorry to say that, due to a combination of various factors, that it's not going to be done in time for the CCSF. Shades of Past Seas and the 2010 CCSF, I guess. Instead, I'm planning on getting it out for Christmas at the latest.

The pack of genetic breeds that was supposed to go along with it is getting canned. In their place is a single genetic breed that follows the same theme. The replacement breed is in fact almost done; I just need to add one more feature to them and color them in.

In place of the Sea Garden, I've two metaroom updates planned.

One of them is for Past Seas. I've found the lift doesn't tell creatures using it to wait. While this isn't a really big problem since the lift only has two stops, I figured I might as well fix it to stop creatures from pushing/pulling the lift multiple times upon reaching their destination. In addition, I also want to fix the Eelgrass (again) to remove instances of the teleporting plant bug. Finally, I'm also planning on buffing the lifeforms so that they reproduce faster when their populations are low.

The other one is for Jennie's Aquanornia. While we do have Devil's Reef and Past Seas for non-swimming creatures, the former is a bit too thematic and the latter's rather small. Aquanornia, on the other hand, is both sizable and pretty generic for an aquatic area. As such, I've taken it upon myself to fix a few problems with it; such as the lack of CA/CA links and especially the fact that it didn't work with DS standalone (you'll still need C3 installed to use it, though). I also removed most of the C3 life that was originally in it, so now it's essentially an aquatic Biodome. I'm more or less finished with this one - I just need to compile the agent file and it's ready to go.

The final project is a few aquatic Garden Box agents, especially the Gumin Grass conversion that I originally lacked ideas for. In addition, I'm planning on converting some C2 stuff, some lifeforms from Aquatilis Caverna, and all the Past Seas lifeforms.

Apologies to anyone who expected the Sea Garden, but hopefully everything else that I'm releasing should help mitigate that issue somewhat.

Sea Garden Preview

So I finally figured out a way around my GIMP problem - as it turns out, Edos (part of Jagent) is perfectly capable of working with .png files, and can turn a bunch of them into a .c16 file at once to boot. So I just use GIMP to resize seeds and whatnot, and use Edos for the actual sprite compiling. I still can't do anything with .blk files, but I usually don't use GIMP to edit those anyway.

Which means I've finally stopped slacking and started working on the Sea Garden:

SEEEEEEEEEEDS.

I'm actually more or less done with this particular plant now (all I need to do is code the vendor), and while they still emit a copious amount of seeds, they're not quite as prolific as this picture suggests. By the way, the grendels in the picture are a project in and of themselves; while they were made primarily to test the Sea Garden, I'll probably tweak their genome a bit more and release them alongside the completed Sea Garden.

When will the Sea Garden be done? I don't know, considering that Mea's still working on the sprites. I'm hoping it'll be out by the CCSF at the latest, but I make no promises.

Edit: Also, you may or may have not noticed the new Fish Tank gadget. You can click on the area to feed the fish, and if they aren't eating the fish will cuddle up to the mouse pointer expecting food. It's not particularly special, but it is a fun little time waster. Hopefully, it doesn't slow down the other, more important parts of the blog too much.