It's been forever since I did any kind of update here, let alone anywhere online beyond a small circle of friends. My view on a lot of stuff for the future has change, so have my interests and goals. I feel like I've always been on a bit of a holding pattern here. That's why I've been posting less and less. At the same time I've been trying to grow out into other places under different names.

Vorefable, and Packedrat were largely done out of the want to make a game, but more and more i realized people were really just in it for the lewds. To be honest I cannot blame them at all. This is pretty much a porn site! Lots of requests for gallery modes, or to make it easier. I'll always treasure the posts commenting on the game's design, or giving feedback/bug reports of the game itself. Those are what drove me to keep working on it. The lewdness was largely a byproduct of my imagination and lack of real drive other then sexual. To put it bluntly.... I feel like I wasn't inspired enough to truly bring the project to its end on libido alone. Even more so after I fractured off into a SFW mod, and.... I never lost that drive. Working with a close nit team that also shared it. Wanting to work on a project for the sake of the project, and not just because I wanted to try animating porn. Which is.... to be honest a bit funny. I'm barely an artist, let alone an animator. I'm really just some jackass that knows how to make computers do what I want. Mix a buncha side stuff together and you get a game if you wait long enough. That's probably underselling myself though.

I don't know if I'll ever come back to packed. Maybe I'll just start silently updating it, but I've never been one that cares for fame or even money. To be honest, Money only really brings me anxiety. I'd been asked to open up a donation link long ago for people who wanted to share because of packed, but now it weights on my mind that I let people down. Packed was always intended as a project I could push to some kind of end, but I don't even think I can right now. Not with knowing what its like to have a real drive for a project, and having a team as well. I've got a lot to rethink. As well as a few plans. I'm kinda excited for the future as much as I'm concerned. That's probably more my anxiety acting up. I have stated a few times before that money doesn't drive me, nor does it control my motivations. Hell, if someone dumped a large sum on me with the expectation of pushing me to finish packed, i'd probably run away screaming and smash refund. This isn't a job to me, and making it so would kill it. Right now... It's more in a weird flux.

I don't hate packed like I do vorefable. VF turned into a project run by demands from others, and no drive within myself. Sort of shambling along already dead for several months, before i just... stopped. I went to work on megaman for a while. a project entirely divorced from lewd stuff. The funny thing is that the original engine from that megaman game ended up being the base of packed. I even went back and patched the megaman game with packed's platforming code and improved it considerably. After that I worked on packed till the driver just.... died again, like it did for VF. I don't think i've ever been able to take a lewd project till its end on lewd alone.

As for the people who have always been clamoring to help out, or provide art.... I've always leaned away from that, as I wanted packed to maintain a consistent style. Not to jump between several different designs and directions, and becoming a confusing patchwork of content in the process. I say this, because i'm honestly bad at managing a team, and even more so, rejecting content that isn't in line with what the end goal is. I'd always be too worries to upset or disappoint someone that was excited to be included. Instead of dealing with that, I just did the blanket policy of working alone. Something I've had 10 or so months now to rethink, after actually being in a proper team.

I don't want to be a team leader, I'm just a content guy. I'll work under my own direction if I need to.

In the end, I think the right thing to do is to probably just release packed's source code and resources, and let people do with it as they wish. If I'm not working on it, it may as well be a fun toy for people learning how to make games like it. I don't think I'll be releasing the spine sprite resources, due to many of those characters being owned. I'd need to do a lot more clearance. It's a lot harder to edit the current sprites into new stuff, I still expect people to ask permission from the actual character owners when using the sprites from them in other things. The credits contains details of who owns what.

I fully admit, my code ain't perfect, and I swear like a sailor. I will not be cleaning it up much, beyond filtering out some sensitive information. Hopefully this helps some peeps out who've wanted to see how games work internally. Sorry about the promises I've made to a few people regarding places in the game they'd be. Hopefully all my stuff is cleaned out properly too. Otherwise I'm going to need to change some things. This also contains some changes I'd not pushed to nightly yet. The only downside is I do not know if it compiles (if i was in the middle of work, or if the game has become bugged since I last worked on it due to updates to gamemaker studio 1.4 . This has not been ported to gamemaker studio 2.0 .

https://www.dropbox.com/s/efnavpkp2.....-2019.zip?dl=0

Unsure how much I'll be posting here again. I'm honestly expanding out to other things, and find myself coming here less and less. Christ my anxiety in a flare up over this, but it's about time I post it. I've been talking with close friends for half an hour to even work up to this heh. Let alone the months knowing this was coming, and avoiding it.



EDIT!:
I was testing bat form stuff when i stopped working apparently. if you want transformation to work normally (without always tfing into the bat) you'll need to open the script scr_platphysics_playercontrol , and change line 460, it will look like "selected_transformation = player_transformations.bat;" to "selected_transformation = player_transformations.rat;" this will allow proper control of transformation by the game. the micro transformation was moved exclusively to the alsnapz enemies in the jungle. so the down hold TF was exclusively for rat form. I was gonna add holding up for the bat later.