NaNoWriMo Report + Genogatchi

I’m sad to report that this month’s NaNoWriMo didn’t get off the ground! It’s the first time in five years that I haven’t reached 50,000 words. In fact, I only reached about 1,600 words.

I said I’d go easy this year, and I did, but I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed I didn’t get any further. The idea was to do vignettes and short stories for The Waking Cloak, and while I got some decent outlining and lore done (which was actually really helpful), ultimately my motivation wasn’t quite enough.

I do feel a little like I let you guys down after that sneaky trailer from several weeks ago. The good news is I did write up “what happened” as far as the stories and such go, it’s just not in a very readable or interesting format. I hope you’ll forgive me for that!

There is good news though!

I’ve had the motivation to work on a side project of mine that’s been stewing a while called Genogatchi. This is a mashup of Monster Rancher, the Chao Garden from SA2B, and randomly generated creatures. The scope is nice and small on it, and I’m hoping to get it finished up by the end of January 2019.

Here’s a (very WIP) example! I’ve got debug options turned on so that a new monster gets generated each time you click. Here you can see some of the variety. :)

I got a bit further on the menus here, still working on these:

So I hope you’ll look forward to this!

As far as The Waking Cloak itself goes, I’ve made good progress on the enemy AI (as you can see in the highlights reel of the stream) and have been inspired to do some work on the map thanks to the lovely folks in the Discord server.

By the way, if you’d like to join us on Discord, here’s the invite link! We’re a pretty small but friendly community, and if you join, I hope you feel welcome!

That’s all for now. I’m gonna go get something to eat and see if I can get the next Genogatchi menu working. Hope you have a good one!