On the 10th, my PC broke. At first we thought it was just a video card problem, but after ordering a new one it still didn't work, and long story short I needed to get a whole new one, which arrived two days ago and which is finally set up properly just now. My files are fine, but I wasn't able to work on Misery of Magic or any of my music charts for that time.

Now everything should mostly return to normal. I hope!

Decided to change it up, here's something a bit more cheerful this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY7O6_WcTJ0

It's been a while since the last update, hasn't it?

I have made all of the demons for Fire Hole. This is the biggest and most ambitious area, which is one of the reasons why it took so damn long. The other reason is, well, I've been a little lazy I guess, development has been turning into Zeno's race lately. The game will get finished, though, that is my promise to everybody. It's already been two years. I wanted it to be a towering masterpiece that'll blow everybody's minds, and I'm not confident at all that it'll live up to that ambition but, whatever, it's still my best work yet.

The good news is this is the last really big area. The 8th and final level, which doesn't have a final name yet, will be a lot smaller in terms of the amount of new stuff I'll have to make. There's also a thing called Ascension Walk I want to make. The idea is that this is a super-hard secret challenge area close to the beginning. That'll also be a lot smaller.

Fallen a bit behind schedule, had a lot of work to do lately. That'll probably keep up for a couple more weeks.

I have finished the map for the 7th area! This will be a large and ambitious area with a total of 58 rooms.

Now, to make the stuff for it~

My thoughts on Kero:

So, as some people might already be aware, some unhinged madness has been spiralling around the YouTuber Kero the Wolf ever since last Thursday.

Jesus fucking christ, these are some colourful allegations. The video at /watch?v=sbzUOajs2d8 has a nice capsule summary of what he's being accused of, if you have the stomach for it.

I always kinda liked Kero. He's so happy and seems to have a good influence on everything around him. I never met the guy, however, although I'm still subscribed to him.

I've been vacillating on whether or not I believe Kero and the other 14 people implicated are guilty ever since the leaks happened. Whenever something like this comes up, I always give the benefit of the doubt to a large extent, for the obvious reasons: the type I error of excoriating an innocent is generally a lot worse than the corresponding type II error, I like to believe the best in people, if I wholeheartedly say I believe something which later turns out to be bullshit then I look like an idiot, and most of the time e-celebrity drama does indeed turn out to be bullshit. Despite that, on day one, I thought there was so much evidence that there's no way it couldn't be true.

On day two I did a complete 180: after seeing the Pkrussl video and the information in the zsne1 group on Telegram, I believed him innocent, because there were a number of details which didn't make sense to me. A hypothesis was formed that the leaked chat logs were all forged – which is demonstrably possible to do – either outright or by taking real chat logs and modifying them to make them sinister. The images and videos weren't made by Kero & friends but were instead from some pre-existing collection originating from 4chan, and the leaks were essentially some targeted attack to frame Kero along with fourteen other people I've never heard of. It seems incredibly far-fetched, but that's what the evidence pointed to at the time.

That position started slipping as even more information became available. Internet sleuths soon deduced that Kero didn't appear personally in any of the offending images or videos which, if he were, would prove beyond all doubt that the allegations against him were true. Kero himself showed up to provide evidence that an indiviudal believed to be him was in fact a completely different person. However, opinions are divided as to whether Koda, who died in February 2017 and who Kero ostensibly abused, was present in them (Koda's death was due to kidney failure and appears to be unrelated to any abuse, real or imagined).

Even more unfortunately for Kero, some of the points brought up in the Pkrussl video in his defense didn't appear to hold water. Firstly, it was claimed that some JPEG artifacts found on a screenshot from Twitter were evidence that the screenshot had been tampered with because the level of loss was inconsistent across the image. However, they looked normal to me – JPEG encoding will leave large areas of uniform colour untouched with no artifacts at all. Secondly, it was believed that it was plausible for hackers from Iran to have compromised Kero's Telegram account. I find that to be highly unlikely because Telegram is well-known for its high level of security. Thirdly, and, to me, most compellingly, all of the chat logs didn't show the users' profile pictures, instead displaying blank circles with initials in them. I thought that could only happen if the user had no profile picture (damn near everybody does), the pictures hadn't loaded properly (which typically fixes itself after a couple of seconds) or the user had blocked you (and you can't block yourself obviously). I looked into this, and at first there appeared to be no Telegram feature which could hide all profile pictures. However, at the time, both Pkrussl and I didn't know about the "export chat history" feature, which creates nice pretty chat logs which look exactly like those from the leaks. I've done this on one of my own Telegram chats to demonstrate:

https://i.imgur.com/WbkuMT6.png

While most of the images and videos are still believed to come from some earlier source, and Kero is confirmed to not be in them, I no longer see any reason why the chat logs can't be real. The full chat logs, which are available in full on KiwiFarms, are voluminous and detailed. They are about 36 000 words long. It is possible in theory to fake them, but that would take a phenomenal amount of effort. Events discussed in the chatlogs cross-confirm events discussed in Kero's Twitter, and the style of writing also matches Kero's. It seems unlikely that it could be fabricated, and, now, I'm inclined to believe that the chat logs are legit, which would imply the guilt of Kero and his fourteen associates. In addition, his boyfriend Colwyn, who died last month of a heroin overdose, would also be implicated.

While it's still kind of possible that he isn't, I think the probability that he is guilty to be very high. That's the end of the factual component of this post. I now want to ramble vaguely about my gut feelings.

Even if all of this is true, a big part of me still wants to give Kero a big hug. That's because I'm way too compassionate for my own good. I've sent people apologies when I consciously know I've done nothing wrong just to satisfy my conscience when it inexplicably tells me I have. It would be cool to speak to him, just to hear what he's going through right now. You've got to wonder what made a person become like this. It would be fascinating.

That's one of two reasons why it would be hypocritical of me to fault the stalker-fans who blindly reject the evidence against Kero and take his side no matter what. If it turned out that one of my close friends had done something comparable to what Kero has allegedly done, I would do the same. I'd fight to the edges of the Earth to defend my friend in that case, regardess of how wrong he was. I wouldn't care, because there are some people I simply have undying loyalty to and that renders my usual morality irrelevant, and undying loyalty is a beautiful thing. I have their back, unconditionally. I hope at least some of those close friends feel the same way about me, because, in a crisis, I'd need them the most.

One final note, one thing I always say whenever a scandal turns out to be real is that you have to be an idiot to get caught. When Austin Jones got busted for CP last year, he was an idiot for failing to learn from the much smaller scandal in 2015 got him kicked out of EmoTube and almost cost him his career. When Matt Jarbo got caught false-flagging, he was an idiot for using his main account to do it. If I were to hypothetically do something ultra-sketchy, I'd at least do it under an entirely new pseudonym. If Kero had done the same, nobody would ever know about this. Given the constant churn of e-celebrity drama and the internet's short attention span, it is very easy for most of us to avoid being the next witch at the stake.

And so, let us watch Kero burn. Some of us may wish to dance on his grave. Others may weep for him. I choose to stand here in silence. I won't bother with forgiveness, and I won't bother cursing his name. It's too late for that. I find no joy in his destruction, but, as with everybody burned before him, I find some lessons. No matter what we decide to do from here on out, let's make sure we never end up like him. Goodbye, Kero the Wolf.

#KeroIsOverParty

I have now made all the weapons I need for all of the five main characters to be playable. There are going to be 36 weapons in the final game, which sounds like a lot, but it includes palette swaps and minor variations only accessible under very specific circumstances. 28 of them are now implemented, up from 17 at the time I wrote the last journal.

I plan on removing the Effects system, because it does nothing at the moment and I have no idea what I want to do with it. Maybe it will come back in a future project.

It's been a little slow lately, studying has been a little intense lately, but Energy Centre is now pretty much done and bugtested.

Before rushing on ahead and creating the 7th area, there's some features which I've been putting off doing which should probably be in place for it to function as intended.

Also, something totally unrelated, I'll be going to NeonFur this year! :3

The map for the Energy Centre is already finished! It's smaller than all of the main areas, but bigger than Awakening. Like Awakening, rather than having a mix of hardcoded and random encounters, there will only be a few encounters and all of them will be hardcoded. At the moment I'm looking at having two "boss" demons, something like the extra hard encounters I put at the end of each main area or the Inner Demon from Awakening.

The Energy Centre will be completely optional -- only accessible as solo Emerald and only by solving a difficult puzzle. It will be balanced around level 75.

This update is a little overdue I guess. Sorrow Peak has been finished for a couple of weeks now, and since then I've been slowly starting to work on the Energy Centre. This will be a short optional area and one of two places where the final major character might show up. I don't really want to say too much about it until it starts coming together...

I've made the Nuclear Blaze puzzle sub-area, which works very well, as well as all the Sorrow Peak enemies! I have yet to bugtest them, however, and I will be doing that for the next several days probably. There's also another puzzle I want to add to Sorrow Peak, as well as the new character I keep teasing and another very cool looking sub-area I still need to make accessible.

Misery of Magic Discord: https://discord.gg/dtjHMzQ

There's also some other secret stuff in the works, but that might not come to light for a while yet, if ever...

The Sorrow Peak map is all finished now. I'm really pleased with how it looks!

I'm not pleased with the pace of progress, however, so I decided last week that I will spend at least one hour working on the game every day. That way, everybody can be sure that something's actually happening.

I'll be revealing a new character soonish. Before I do that, I have to make the Sorrow Peak enemies and basically fill out the area with actual stuff, and I also want to add some new weapons -- I've already made a couple, the most interesting being the Nuclear Blaze, which I still need to make obtainable in the game. There's a little sub-area I have yet to make, I'll probably put it there.

I've made the second part of Top Level now! This will connect to the rest of the areas, through to the endgame. One of those areas is locked by a totally evil puzzle, which is inspired by a somewhat similar but considerably distinct puzzle in the obscure Myst Zone area from Lunar Shadow.

The next thing to do should be to make the 6th area. I won't reveal anything about it until I have something to show off to you guys. I think I might make some new weapons first as well.

I've started a Discord server, for talking about Misery of Magic and generally hanging out with me, if anybody's interested! ^.^

https://discord.gg/XjzGbES

Phase Three is up! You can get it here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1C.....lBHqqLsOUhcieD

To anybody who downloaded 0.3.0 (all 1 of you), performance might be inexplicably bad. This was due to a known issue with GMS, which I've been able to work around and it should be fixed in 0.3.1, so if you have issues, try re-downloading.

I wanted to avoid talking about a lot of my game design decisions until some public version of the game is available. There are still a couple of specific ones I think work best if the player doesn't see them coming, but now that it's out I'll talk about some other stuff.

My biggest inspiration is Merlin's Revenge -- an old trilogy of action-RPGs from which I basically borrowed the central combat mechanics. While the other weapons are all more or less original and have different inspirations, the Orb and Toxicity Star are basically clones of MR's Energy Blast and Energy Pulse respectively. Unfortunately, because they run on the ancient Shockwave platform, the MR games are pretty much unplayable on Windows 10.

Another inspiration is Undertale. I'm not interested in replicating its meta self-referential outside-its-own-box-ness or its message or even its approach to player choice. There was one other thing it did very well: it constantly changes things up, all the time, so that one runs into interesting new encounters all the time. It also uses a mix of hardcoded and random encounters. I take the same approach in Misery of Magic. There are a lot of enemies -- over 40 types -- many of which only appear once. That keeps it a lot more intereting than reusing the same ones over and over. Then, I've got occasional puzzles as well to break up the game.

Then there's Lunar Shadow. It's a Cave Story mod made by the excellent Kim Tyranto which does a lot of things very right and which I highly recommend. It has this great writing style which has a balance of silly and serious and it's full of weird and whimsical things, which make Tirahnys seem like an interesting place with lots of stuff going on. I tried to do something similar, but I don't think I did it as well.

My approach to storytelling has three key ideas: Keep the player in control as much as possible, player choice has to be done through the mechanics, and the story and world need to be explained organically and in small pieces. So, no cutscenes, no throwing the player into a menu when there is a decision to be made, and no unjustifiable or excessively large exposition dumps. Instead, when you decide to do something relevant to the story, you're doing it yourself in real time. You get out-of-context pieces of the universe explained just by looking around and interacting with objects and other characters. While Emerald is, to some extent, an empty shell one can project oneself onto, at the same time he knows things, mostly background lore, that the player doesn't.

So yeah. Just wanted to talk about some of this stuff.

It's all coming together. Phase Three is only a few days away.

I've added the save system, which was less hassle than I expected it to be. Now, I'm switching out all the placeholder music for music I actually have the rights to. It's still mostly placeholder music, though -- only a few "final" songs are in it, with the rest being mostly abandoned projects I had lying around and music borrowed from my other games. One of those final songs is by my friend Jake, and right now I'm waiting on for him to send it to me.

At the same time, I'll be doing another round of testing, to hopefully catch some more bugs, and maybe make a few minor adjustments to things I'm not entirely happy with. Then, it's go time~!

Not gonna lie, I'm kinda nervous about putting this out there. Misery of Magic is my big passion project, and it's likely to be the best game I ever make. I've thought about it for many years, I tried to make it in early 2015 but scrapped that iteration because it wasn't working out as well as I envisioned and because I was worried I didn't have the skills to do it properly. Ignoring that, this current iteration is already the longest a single one of my games has spent in active development: I started seriously in December of 2016 and it's still not even close to finished. It's not because it's phenomenally large -- the final game will probably take 2-3 hours from start to finish, roughly comparable to Legend Of Grey Moon, which I made in 2013 in only 5 months. There are two reasons for the slowness. Firstly, there's the cliche one: University soaked up most of my mental energy in 2017, and that's really important to me and I don't want to jeopardise it. The other one is that, unlike LoGM, if something kind of worked but didn't look or function exactly how I wanted it to, I kept working on it until I got it right. I could -- like I did for LoGM -- generate lots of reasonably solid content with minor differences out of the same few building blocks and get the game done by like April, but I don't want to, I'm more ambitious this time. When I started, I had to decide what things I would be willing to cut corners on for the sake of speeding up development and what I couldn't compromise on. In practice, I cut fewer corners than I planned to.

Phase Three will have somewhere around 60% of the content of the final game, and some stuff will be a little rough but all the important features will be there and it's going to work mostly how it's supposed to. I hope.

Ok! :3 I've added a lot of minor stuff to the game -- minor characters standing around the world, flavour text, stuff like that. I've also fixed a hell of a lot of bugs.

All that's left to do before Phase Three is to make the save system. I'm not 100% sure how it's going to work and it might be kinda difficult, but it's going to be important because the game's kinda hard and it'd be super frustrating without it.

All of the new demons are implemented and mostly bugtested! I've also added to the tileset and redecorated all of Underpath, so it'll hopefully be a bit more interesting now.

I've thought of a really good idea for something I could do with the upcoming new character Kris, but I'm not completely sure yet. I also want to be careful about what I reveal --
while knowing the names of the areas and characters and what they look like in advance is very unlikely to affect anybody's enjoyment of the game, there are a lot of other things which could.

Another thing I've done is heavily modify and rebalance the Slash-type melee attacks, so that they now feel way more fun to use and are viable in some situations other than those where physical damage is 100% necessary. One of the changes was a small tweak which I applied to Mirror Wave as well, but that's mostly been left alone because it's already pretty well balanced.

The first public version, 0.3.0, which from now on I will refer to as "Phase Three", should hopefully be done sometime around January. I can't wait to see what people think of it! :D It would be really good to get some proper feedback, because the testers in the first two (closed) phases weren't particularly helpful.

I've finished all the sprites for the Underpath demons, of which there are 10. The next step is, obviously, putting them in the game. After that, I'll start working on the new character.

I have /finally/ finished the map for Underpath. Progress has been slow because I've been kinda lazy. It's a fairly big area, with 47 rooms in total. While Backwoods and The Remnant are technically bigger, with 56 and 55 rooms respectively, those include a lot of "safe" areas with very little gameplay -- The Remnant has its exterior, connecting walkway, and upper levels, while Backwoods has a water tunnel, research station, and cliffside. By contrast, Underpath has very little of that kind of thing, so it would probably be larger if those were excluded from the count.

The character assocated with this area will be the new character Kris, who will play an important role in the story but won't have the long-standing importance that Jaye and Hunter will have.

While it can be accessed much earlier, Underpath will be balanced around a level 44 Emerald with red weapons. It will be designed to be extremely difficult without first getting the red weapons.

It will connect the two halves of the overworld. The Western part is mostly complete, and will comprise everything from Shade Hollow to now plus an optional bonus area I'll add much later. The Eastern part, which I've yet to start work on, will be slightly smaller and contain the sixth and seventh areas plus another optional bonus area and, eventually, a one-way path to the endgame, eighth area.

Hahaha, I'll probably never be able to finish this game.

Hi guys!

I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in this, but last month, I started a furry music chart series on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J6onIkCLIQ

It's based on streaming on Youtube, Soundcloud, and here on FA.

What do you people think?

Now that Awakening is all done, I will move onto the next area shortly.

I've also made the red weapons that are unlocked by completing it, which will be slightly stronger than and replace their white counterparts but will be tier 1 when you get them.

Once Underpath is finished, which will probably take a while, I'll work on the save feature after that and then I might release a public test version. As it is now, I think the game's too hard and some of the puzzles are a bit outrageous, especially the one with the matrices. The people I chose for the last test version way back in like May weren't really that helpful in terms of feedback because I don't think any of them got past the first area. Haha.

*snuggles all of you* ^.^

So, I have created two new weapons for the game! One will be a white weapon that's powerful but hard to hit things with, and the other one, which Hunter will give you if you complete the upper level of Remnant and haven't pissed him off, is a blue weapon which can reflect enemy attacks and deals physical damage.

Really happy with how they both turned out.

Surprisingly little to report on the game... Slowly trudging along, I've done a lot of stuff but nothing cool and sparkly I can really show off.

I've also been bogged down with real life type stuff, I have a lot going on right now.

~Aurora

All the encounters for The Remnant are up and running. Next, I'm creating some puzzles for it. I've already written all the code I need for them, and I've created one puzzle, although I'd like to have two more. That shouldn't take too long.

After that, I have to add some story stuff to the area, including that new character I mentioned earlier, and add a couple of new weapons and a few new rooms, then the zone will be basically done for the time being.

The fifth area will be called Underpath. It will require a mastery of some game mechanic which I won't talk about because I want players to go into the game without knowing anything about it. It will also be extremely difficult without first triggering some event, which will become available after clearing both Backwoods and The Remnant and which will grant a considerable power upgrade. However, there's a lot of other stuff I want to do before starting work on it.

The new version of my fursona is still coming. Hopefully soonish.