Time for another report. Let's get started.
August was a somber month for us at Broken Hammer. One of the things that didn't get mentioned in July was the fact that we lost two office cats. Aibou and Millenium who both passed rather tragically. Then to follow it up, Pudge, our most beloved office cat, also passed early in August. What got them was antifreeze poisoning. Aibou, being semi feral, we simply didn't find her for days and at the same time, Millenium started showing signs she ingested something bad. Due to her age and kidney issues, she died pretty quickly and we just didn't think about testing to find out. Aibou was found later with what looked to be injuries and at the time, we had no clue what they had gotten into. Wasn't until much later did we realize her injuries likely came from falling off the roof.
Hindsight is 20/20 and if we had tested the one, we could have avoided what was to come next...Pudge.
Pudge came a week later. He started showing similar drunk symptoms that Millenium had and we got him to an ER vet as soon as we could. Unfortunately, when they found out it was antifreeze poisoning, they gave us the bad news. It's 96% fatal unless you catch it immediately and even then it's pretty fatal. He was semi comatose and with no good prognosis, we elected to put him to sleep.
His brother and sister are okay and safe but, a lot of joy left the office this month. Even those two have been acting different. Pudge really was the center of everything for them.
How they got into antifreeze? That is unknown but, there is suspicion of a disturbed neighbor that could have purposely poisoned them. However, there is no hard evidence. As a studio of animal lovers, we can't stress enough that if you see your pet suddenly acting drunk, get them into an ER vet immediately.
That all said, we did continue work on loading in the expressions for The Father's Story. Progress there was pretty solid once we got everything loaded in with just some work needed to add in a few more options.
Going back to the start of the project, we really had wanted to simplify the expressions to speed up development time but when we got to this point, the difference is so drastic that we deemed it necessary to do more full expression sets.
Currently, that work is paying off as the characters look much better in engine with full expressions.
Outside of that, we began testing some AI art and music apps for concept purposes. We've never dabbled in them but decided to try it after noticing one of our artists trying them out. What we found was certainly what we expected to find. They are useful for concepting but for actual content creation that we need, they just can't compare. Real artists definitely do it better.
The only aspect where we might consider using them for final work would be big cityscape or certain types of backgrounds. However, even those are very hit or miss. It simply can take thousands of attempts before the AI figures out what you want it to do.
With that said, September will be continuing heavy development to finish up the Father's Story. Those interested we welcome to wishlist it now as it will help it more later when we do the final release: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3049110/The_Fathers_Story/
Alright, that's it for August. We'll see you in the skies!
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