The last week and a half have been pretty fucking rough, to be honest.

It's not long enough to get over the things that happened, but I'm now at a stage where I need to start moving things on. In case you missed it, here's what happened:

2 weeks ago, I rehomed a dog. She'd been fighting with the other dog in the house, which was down to being territorial over the owner rather than general aggression. As a result, she'd been to a behaviourist who used dubious means, but had also been muzzled and caged for several weeks.

It took a few days for her to settle in. I'd taken a week off work to handle settling in and starting a routine with her. Everything was going well, she was a lovely dog, really friendly and needing attention constantly, but it was working. On the monday, we went out for a decent walk, took her to see my family, we came home, she ate, drank, went to sleep and died. I tried resuscitation, but she was gone. On the tuesday, I had to arrange for a post-mortem as the breeder needs to know what went wrong, and to be honest so do I. It's important for me to know if it was my fault. On the wednesday, I had to pick her body up from the vets and drive her to the vets school for her post-mortem. As I was leaving the house, my work sacked me for not coming back to work. I'd arranged sick days, and explained what had happened, but they interpreted it as "not wanting to work". They then threatened me with legal action if I told people I'd lost my job.

The last week has been rough. The preliminary results are saying the only thing I did to her was the chest compressions, which caused some damage to her ribs, but they said that it showed I'd been doing the chest compressions properly. Since then I've been a bit listless and struggling to do any work or even concentrate on anything.

Until last night. I've come to some decisions and made a plan. The first step is completing the phase 1 rebuild. That then frees my time up for doing some work I've been offered, which I'll be using to basically get into a position to try and switch between work and more time doing game development stuff.

Step One

Today I've been back to work on the game. 

• Finished up the openForest rebuild
• Added a howl cooldown
• Improved fluids with ribbons
• Added a much better photomode
• added proper jiggle
• Finished the Load Game system
• added minimap with proper icons
• moved rocks from inventory to ui
• added a camera height system to raise and lower during animations to match where the characters are
• added sound options in settings
• added pause menu
• split audio settings into Master, SFX and Music

That fully clears out all the remaining tasks and leaving just bugs. Through the day, I've knocked out:

• 6 General bugs
• 11 Player bugs
• 3 level generation bugs
• 3 enemy bugs

That leaves the rebuild with 3 more enemy bugs and 7 levels to model and populate with foliage. After that, I'll start compiling the game and resolving any errors that are picked up by that.

So, progress has resumed, I've got a new drive to get things done. I've got a plan to work towards. I've been careful to try and keep the rebuild within the range of features the original Phase 1 had, but with a bit more polish. That means when its done, there will still be issues. Things like enemy AI which is due up first thing in Phase 2. I've also had to stop myself adding more animations, because of the animation update due next. The good news as well is that through the rebuild, it's managed to knock quite a few items off the list for a Steam MVP release, so once it's done, we should be in a good position.

I'm hoping to get the game out on Patreon within the next week, with a proper release on here coming a week later. I'll update once I can finalise dates.