I am someone who constantly underestimates the work she is capable of... and of course this has trickled into this project. Before discussing the largest change in the development cycle, I want to give a brief update of where I think this game will be by my deadline of first week in May:

Initially, I was hoping to have this be an early access title, on Steam or here on Itch. This is likely not going to be the case. I have been so stuck in my head for the past month that I have lost so much time to my own self doubt and heavy criticism of myself. There is just too much I need to teach myself for me to have a "completed." game i my time frame. Maybe this project will get small updates post my deadline, but this is just the reality. I am not a good enough dev at this point in time to create an entire project by myself in 5 months. Not with being a full-time student and working part-time.

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Okay, enough self-loathing. Actual update time. It's not super dense because, well, I don't have much in terms of content update - most of my time has been spent recreating previous assets...

I am not an animator in the slightest, and I am also not really an artist. It was ridiculous of me to believe I was going to be able to fully animate two hand drawn characters with all of their move sets while also being responsible for systems and mechanic designs.

As of right now, I am recreating my two characters in 3D modeling software (Blender). My plan is to model them in a way that their rigs retain some humanoid components so I can reuse animations already available from sites like Mixamo. This way, I can easily swap in and out animations to test out different move ideas without needed me to hand draw key frames each time.

This is certainly more upfront time in the modeling and rigging process, but the ease of being able to swap out options on a whim (and not needing to hand draw every change) will hopefully get the project back on track and let me focus on my mechanics.