This is a 22nd in a series of devlogs about Crystal in Carnations, but the first devlog in itch. Furthermore, this particular devlog is extremely gif-heavy, but I have discovered that gifs might be broken on itch.io's side. (And many of my gifs are too large for itch) If you want to see any earlier devlogs, or all the gifs, I encourage you to visit our Salmon Snake Games discord server

If this is a first devlog of mine that you've read: Welcome! I'm so happy you're here! 

These devlogs are something I write in a biweekly-ish basis about the development of our game. They function as a kind of nice list of things my team and I accomplished over the last two weeks. Game development easily tricks your brain into wondering if you are actually progressing at all, so it's good to remind yourself of the things that you HAVE done.

In these devlogs I chop the latest sprint in categories of art progress, programming progress, story progress and marketing progress. Without further ado, please take a look:

Art: 

• I finished Siegfried's expressions and added him in the game. Only 5 characters left now that don't have expression sets yet! 
• Hani and Vivi have worked on the pixel sprites of King Dardaine and Fleurette respectively 

Coding:  

• I implemented a system that searches the script files for first battle, and retreat quotes and plays them if conditions are met. 
• I implemented my very first "Enemy AI" in the game. The enemies don't do much yet, they only take 1 step back and end their turn, but at least they take the turn on their own. 
• Huge thanks to MythrilZenith on their excellent video on Fire Emblem enemy AI patterns that popped on my feed just as I was pondering on how to start working on this aspect of the game!
•  I did some code house keeping in the form of collecting our menu strings in a separate file. This should make it easier to localize the game down the line, if we ever have the opportunity. 
• Also Defined a file for timings and so called magic numbers so that game flow and balance can be adjusted without hunting down values from all over the codebase 
• I implemented skill animations, death animations and damage numbers in the game. This should make it easier to see what even is happening on the screen. 
• I further refined the skill animations, by adding emission map implementation and an optional bloom effect for them. 
•  I refined our controls for easier navigation of menus regardless of control scheme (mouse, keyboard, controller) 
• I fixed a bug where the system started treating player characters as enemies, if you killed every enemy.

Story and Marketing: 

• Not much news on these fronts, aside that they are worked on at steady pace by other team members 
• Our current wishlist count stands at 65 (+8). Wishlist the game here!

That's about it for today's devlog. I now see that this devlog is quite thin without all the gifs I recorded... But no can do,. I sadly can't upload them here :( 

We'll see how much effort it is to keep posting these devlogs on Discord, Bluesky, Steam and Itch. If it takes too much time away from development, I might elect to abandon one of the platforms or alternate platforms every once in a while. But I'll try to keep these beginning and ending ramblings short (with pretty bad success rate...)