July 1st 2026

On July 1st, 1990, at 8:30am, Fire Fox's brain was fully activated and wirelessly connected to her first body.  Dr. Sound inserted a wind-up key into the back of the torso, just below the neck, and, after fully turning it three times, Fire Fox's body was fully wound up.  After taking her first breath, Fire Fox deliver her first verbal communication: "Good morning Mom!"

Fire Fox, with the "personal name" of Fiona, is the second Clockwork Companion created by Dr. Sound.  While she and her five other "sisters" were mostly finished by about the same time, Dr. Sound decided to give each of them their own "birthday" and chose the specific dates that their brains would be fully activated.

Clockwork Companions have an indestructible brain that is kept separate from their body.  The brain can only connect to a body matching the proper design, meaning Fire Fox's brain can only connect to a Fire Fox body, and it cannot connect to a new body until the current body is destroyed by what could be called an automatic disintegration routine, which operates automatically when the overall body is damaged past a specific degree.  While this routine can be manually manipulated by the Clockwork Companion, either by trying to force it when they aren't damaged enough or by trying to prevent it after taking too much damage, doing so will make them feel the human equivalent of physical pain.  The intensity of the pain depends on how damaged or undamaged the body is, but letting the routine handle itself automatically is completely painless.  While repairs and part-replacements to the body are possible, they still wear down over time for a variety of reasons, usually capable of lasting about two or three years, and while five years is theoretically possible, five months tends to be the more optimistic reality.

In terms of personality, Fire Fox could be considered the "big sister" of the group, often taking on the role of leadership for group activites, not because she wants to be in control, but because she genuinely cares about making sure everyone is being treated with compassion and fairness, which she is very good at accomplishing.  She's somewhat based off of my memory of the older sister of someone I once considered a brother who, of course, clearly wants nothing to do with me anymore, just like everyone else I still care very deeply about, although in his case, similar to my favorite cousin, I can justify his reasons for making me want to kill myself, but what I will NOT justify is the damage his sister has done to me by completely erasing me from the history of that "Hero News" thing we created as kids because that relic of the past would have never even existed in the first place without me.

To be forgotten is worse than death.

And with that attempt at rambling about Fire Fox's personality completely ruined and probably making her cry a little, let's move on to showing the current mess of my development workstation.

Those "Gameplay" and "Graphics" boxes are separate windows that I can move around, I just put them there for the sake of this screenshot.  There's also a separate "Debug Frame" window that I'm not going to show because it reveals a few secret features, most of which already exist in the outdated build, but not all of them.

The reason that window is titled "Gameplay" when it should be titled "Bones" is because I am a wizard, this is my laboratory, and I shall do as I please.  This is also why the program is titled "zMapMaker" and why the ladder on the left will get you stuck in the floor, the middle one won't, and the ladder on the right lets you fall off the ladder in a way you're not supposed to be able to fall off a ladder and the result is that your jump state isn't reset and you can jump again after landing on the ground by just holding down the jump button instead of needing to first release the jump button and then press the jump button again after you land on the ground.

Those zeros in the upper-right of the windows mean whatever I need them to mean because I'm constantly changing their purpose.  Right now, the one in the "Gameplay" window is what room (not screen) number I'm in, the top one in the "Graphics" window is the same as "v.Animation.Counter" because I'm an idiot, and the bottom one tells me what frame "obj.Player.Body.3.4" is because I needed to know the frame number of Rock Rodent's right arm wait what?  Oh, it's because I mistook the orange for red in the icon, that's why I picked the wrong one, and it didn't matter because they all return the same information regardless of who you're playing as, okay, but I still don't remember why I needed to know that, but I do know that the off-screen String object coded with "Str$(X Left Frame)" is because I needed to know that while I was coding in the screen scrolling, which is already finished and works great.

Anyway, Fire Fox is "furless" and missing her tail because I needed to include some placeholder graphics that I would recognize as placeholder graphics.

When I started working on this new build, I came up with a new method of displaying the character sprites using a tile-based system that would only load what was needed, thinking this would help save on memory.  The best part is that I didn't need to paste the graphics in one frame at a time, I could just paste in the entire sprite sheet whenever I made an update, which also meant updating the sprite sheets to be much more neat and organized.

This method takes up 200MB of memory.

In the outdated build, I didn't put any thought into memory management and just had all the sprites loaded in at once.  The worst part is that the sprites needed to be added in one frame at a time, which is a painfully tedious chore, especially the arms (which are 96 frames PER ARM), and I absolutely do not want to do it.

This method takes up 20MB of memory.

You can probably figure out why I am just using placeholder graphics for the time being in the new build, which I have already updated to make use of the outdated method instead of the new method, and I don't know why a fancy new method that only loads what is needed takes up tens times more memory than some outdated method that just loads everything in all at once, but I theorize it's because the creators of Multimedia Fusion 2 Developer really knew what they were doing.

At least I can still use the new method for my sprite viewer, where I don't even have to copy anything since it's just reading external image files.  I can just make the updates in Paintshop Pro Version 6.01 while the sprite viewer is running and see the changes happen immediately.  Well, almost immediately, I still need to change characters to make it re-load the image, but it's my sprite viewer, my code, my solutions, my problems, I'll make it do what I want, including titling it "Tile Viewer" instead of "Sprite Viewer" because I didn't notice that until I started adding to this sentence.

I'm mainly working with Lit Lizard since she doesn't have any color patterns to her body and because I love lizard girls.  The reason her tail is missing is because I still need to update how I want the tail animated, although the real challenge is going to be updating how her cape will be animated.  This is also only half of the window for the same reason I'm not showing the "Debug Frame" window, and I've also positioned the "TEST Sprites" window to hide similar secrets, and to hide the fact that I may or may not have finalized the names of all the weapons.  The cut-off text reads "v.Weapon.Frame", and if you've been paying attention, you should be able to figure out why that window is titled "TEST Sprites" without me needing to remind you that I'm a wizard.

If you're wondering why they don't have breasts despite being female, it's because Dr. Sound designed them to look like girls that are around 10 years old, or rather, like they're as old as they can be before puberty begins, and I really don't know how else to word that.  The reason they have nipples is because female characters should always have nipples and absolutely nothing will change my opinion on that.  Helper Hyena, Dr. Sound's first creation, doesn't have nipples because he's a boy, which should always be the method used in cartoons and video games for figuring out with absolute certainty whether a character is male or female.

None of them have anything "down there" because I said so.  You're allowed to take their clothes off and snuggle with them, but you're not allowed to do "that" with them.  Basically, you can do what I want with them, but you can't do what I don't want with them.  I can explain more if you want, and not explain more if you don't want.

Anyway, if neither me nor my Internet connection is dead, my next update will be August 2nd, which is the "birthday" of Water Weasel.  Maybe I should make that update focus on the technical aspects of the game, since Wanda is kind of a "science nerd" and she likes that sort of stuff.

As before, if anyone wants to say or ask anything, here's how to contact me.  I already had one person write to me, and as expected I replied by rambling some information not included in my blog posts (EDIT: Which I later found out they never received, which is very troubling, and why I am grateful they sent another e-mail asking about it (EDIT2: Something something DKIM thing now it works)).  When people reach out to me, I usually assume they want to hear what I have to say, so take that into consideration.

This is my website, and I will not take responsibility for your decision to come here and read what I have written, nor will I tell you to hope that I get the strength to finish this game or to hope that I get the courage to kill myself, because your feelings on this matter should be yours alone to decide.

-Andious Wandarier

Yes, the N key trick from the preblog works here as well.