Status Report #9: 13th of July, 2025

 

She's looking all innocent here, hiding behind the morning clouds, but she knows what she did. >:(

 

 

Good morning, folks! Amalia here, and it's time once again to tell you about the events of this past fortnight!

So, let us begin, starting with our....

 

Musical stuff 

Well, it's been a split two weeks. The first week (30th of June to 6th of July) was totally unproductive in every way because of silly levels of heat. We're not just making excuses, either. We even struggled to get things done at our day-job, so after coming home, doing anything beyond sweating and feeling dismayed was firmly off the table.

 

However! This last week, things have cooled down and we've had a banger. Our next release has come along a good way and is now firmly in the mixing stages. All the main elements are in place, it's got a beginning and an end, and after several working titles, it seems the tune finally has a name that'll stick. It's called....

 

Thunder Stag

 .... if you wanna find out why, you'll have to read it's production report here on our Blog when we release it.😜

Other than that, we kinda decided to refine our priorities a bit and focus on doing things that we actually have any kind of passion for. 

That basically means more music production and blog writing, and less video production. Our shorts project worked out decently well, and we'll still use some shorts to promote our tunes, going forward, but frankly, we don't massively enjoy video-making, and now we had to switch editing software too, which adds a bit of extra bit of "eeeeeh"-factor to it.

You might still see the occasional short like we've been doing, and definitely a few around release times just for promotional purposes, but yeah, we're looking to finally embrace the fact that we just don't really enjoy making videos, trends be damned.

 

Oh, also, we have a curious little side-project going. See, when you make banners, logos etc. for yourself, there's always the question of what fonts you can use, since our music-making is technically a commercial activity.

So, in order to avoid that whole minefield going forward, we've started to design our own font! Not for typing ASCII or anything, just PNG letters. But yeah, that'll mean that we'll be completely on the safe side legally, and also make our various stuff more recognizable because it'll be using our own, distinct font. Neat.🙂

 

So then, that'll do for our musical projects. Let's move on to our...

 

Non-musical things!

 

Well, the first week was mostly the same in this field. Too hot, too much sun, brain didn't work half the time. Meh.

 

   Week 2 was good, though. Along with reshuffling our priorities in regards to music and stuff, we also made some adjustments to our daily routines to make better use of our time and get away from the trappings of social media.

 

As a result, we've had a great week, not being showered in dopamine and actually feeling creative and capable. In fact, i started writing a blog post about this topic, too!😉

 

Also, we've started switching over to MSFS 2024.

Now, you might have seen us criticizing it in the past, and yeah, frankly, much of our criticism still stands. The career mode, for instance, an unholy abomination that shouldn't exist.

 

However, we -did- realize that if we just use it for free flight, like MSFS 2020, then it's perfectly fine, now.

They've fixed the major, most noticable bugs by now, and the sim does look and run decently well.

The thing that got us to start changing over was Black Square's Starship. We used it in 2020 first, but since you get a 2024 version along with your purchase, we decided that this was the best chance 2024 was gonna have to win us over, since a lack of good, compatible, high-quality 3rd party aircraft has been an issue since release.

 

So yeah, we flew the Starship in it, used the chance to properly set things up (the control settings are still a bit of a confusing mess, but oh well.^^), and..... actually had a decent time!

 

....... and then, just afterwards, we saw this:

 

 ..... right. Okay, so it seems the new sim is now starting to actually get some decent airc-

 

 

...... okay, wow, now if this comes with a Magnum P.I. livery, we won't be abl-

 

 

*Grows mustache and presses buy*

 

...... it comes with floats, too. And if you like Magnum, you'll never manage to fly it without getting the theme song stuck in your head!

 

So yeah, MSFS 2024 is starting to get some properly good aircraft. That's super-good, because lack of high-quality aircraft and poor backwards compatibility has always been a major gripe we had with this new sim.

 Mind you, none of those great new machines work in the career mode, and well, actually, barely any of the 3rd party aircraft do. But then, career mode is a ridiculous mess and apparently only marketplace-purchased aircraft will ever work with it anyway, so as a developer, i figure it's a bit of a case of "why bother?".

 

Y'know what? I think MSFS 2024's career mode might be worth it's own blog post. I mean, it's seriously, impressively bad.😜 

But yeah, flight sim aside, we dropped the OG Call to Arms and just switched over to Gates of Hell, the WW2 version that was originally an expansion, but has now turned into it's own game and became *way* more fleshed out than the original game. That's why we switched, too. The original CTA wasn't terrible or anything, but it felt like we were playing a sort of beta version for the game we actually wanted to get to. And yeah, GOH's been stupidly good fun! We also dipped our toes in Battle of Empires 1914-1918, it's older WW1 cousin. Much older version of the engine, but still, seems quite neat.

Thus, our adventures with the gem engine continue. 😀

 

So yeh, that'll be it from us, this time around. Hopefully, you can expect more posts from us going forwards, because doing more blog stuff is part of our re-prioritization efforts!

 

 But until our next post, you folks stay safe, and have a good one!