Hello everyone, I’ve been going through some hardships in the past month so I couldn’t focus on Dekamara and wanted to take it easy for a while. Now that I’m feeling better, I wanted to share a devlog.

 About the next update on Dekamara, we initially planned on releasing 1 Catgirl on top of 4 summons(Squire, Healer, Witch, Warrior). But since stuff happened and we missed our deadline(there wasn't an official deadline but we wanted to make a release at the end of April), we decided to finish all summons(1 for each helper and enemy NPCs except Gatekeeper) and finish everything related to pregnancy this update. Since some summons are going to come with ranged attacks, we decided to make use of Squire’s shield and add her new animation to block ranged attacks. Otherwise, she was going to be too weak against ranged attacks and I don’t want players to completely ignore her just because they have ranged attacks now. 

 So far I’m done with most of the summons, Saver, Mushroom and Healer are the ones left and I’m working on Saver at the moment. After I add Squire’s protection skill and add summoning stage, we’ll be ready for the release.

 We also have very good news! I secretly agreed with a sound designer last month for new SFXs and he’s already done with the job! So next update won’t have any missing SFXs and some SFXs that I didn’t like were also remade. I also want to add a new soundtrack, hopefully with the same composer of our current soundtrack.

With the release of  0.4, we’ll also close the poll, release one more update with new characters before calling this Dekamara game done and start the next one if the poll ends in Dekamara’s favor. We decided to make these two games separate since it’s going to take a different path, probably something like an action adventure with some character development, quests, non-linear progression and whatnot. Puzzles too, of course(maybe I can finally go all out with puzzles!?). With that said, normally I don’t want to talk about personal stuff that’s not related to our projects, but since my health issues affected the development, I feel like I owe an explanation about the recent events. See end of the post.

It’s Shyseel! Last month wasn't very productive. Though I had much needed time for myself. I’m slowly trying to get back into schedule with the help of PsychoMale, of course. And maybe next time, I can take a well earned break instead of a necessary one. 

I am really excited for some of the ideas we came up with Dekamara, though I still have some questions in mind about how we can expand this project for you guys to make a more full game.For me it started as a fun and small project and became more over time thanks to the support we received (and with the fact that I became full time on this project also =w=;;). I noticed making this style of pixel art is really fun to me. I hope to get more updates with the help of PsychoMale.

Trigger Warning: Mentions of Suicide and Depression.
Months ago, after we started working on Dekamara with Shyseel(originally I hired another artist for Dekamara), I was constantly living under the fear of the project getting stagnated or cancelled, since Shyseel is going through some hardships in her life. With each update I felt more and more stressed, a huge benefactor to this was increasing daily costs each day due to factors that were beyond our control. These two elements affected my mood drastically, and I was in a constant state of panic. I often felt like I couldn’t breathe, sharp pain in my chest and most recently, and recently I started hearing my blood flowing through my left ear all day. As I was already familiar with the first two symptoms, and those didn’t affect my performance much(panicking actually made me work harder, even when I was inefficient), I didn’t take it seriously until the last one started, which led me to think that I might have health problems beyond anxiety. Fortunately that was not the case but I started taking an antidepressant that was given by the doctor, which caused me to feel completely different everyday. I lost my motivation and I started to feel disinterested towards everything, which was raising alarms in my head the entire time. Eventually I became suicidal(as side effect of the medicine, I’m not suicidal) and started to have huge mood swings, which led me to quitting meds at once. That also came with withdrawal symptoms, as I’m writing this, I keep getting ‘shocked’ periodically.

Anyway, that’s the gist of what I’ve been going through this last month. I tried my best to work on updates, so it’s not like the entire month has been unproductive. I’ll continue from where I left off and catch up to Shyseel, hopefully releasing 0.4 soon.