When I sat down to film the latest devlog, and in the days leading up to filming, the main question in my mind was, "Was NESMaker a mistake?" I'm not sure I have an answer yet, but at least now I have a path forward. So, here's what's up.

After a series of frustrating bugs, most notably the game only loading the first background palette for the first screen in a sequence, I decided to start over. I still have all of the art and music, but I threw out all but two files of the code. I'd decided, but the community stepped up big between making the call and pulling the trigger.  Board-b, a treasure of the NESMaker community, launched a new set of modules for the platform containing 40+ recommended performance improvements and bug fixes from the community forms. And it has been a lifesaver.

As part of the game's development, I had already been going through the fix list and implementing them individually. I was going to do that all again, this time with better version control to revert in the case of weird bugs like the palette issue, but with the new module, I'm saving days - if not weeks - of work.

Thanks to all that, Bug Squashers is back in development. I need to redo all the custom movements I'd completed, but it's for the best. Those movements were the two files I saved, so it wasn't a total loss. I will need to check on palettes pretty soon, though, because I'd hate to do a bunch of work only to find out the issue is still occurring. With that in mind, I'm setting a new goal - a playable demo ready by mid-November, ahead of the Lady Arcaders Game Jam I'm participating in. I'm learning Godot for that, so I've got a lot on my plate, but thankfully, all of the assets are in place now, so barring anything catastrophic, it's an achievable goal.

I'm also setting a goal of full devlogs every 2 weeks to keep me honest. I've also kicked off a Daily Devlog series, quick 15-30-second updates on what I accomplished that day, as a way to push myself. There's nothing like external accountability to keep things moving, eh?