It’s been a slow couple of weeks for BYTE. I’ve been slowing down pitching until next week after the guest speaker but I have sent off about six or so pitches, of which I got some pretty encouraging feedback (still a rejection, but this one at least felt good). That pitch led to me pitching to a couple of other publishers that weren’t on my radar, but it hasn’t gone any further than that.

I did go through my list of 300 games releasing in 2024 and Google every single one to find its publisher. I started that a while ago but finished it up this past week. I now have a list of 64 publishers that might be decent fits and have sent pitches to eleven. Both of those numbers may wind up going up again as I reevaluate some publishers I didn’t add to my list initially but for now, I will start sending out some pitches again.

I did do some work on BYTE, though. Namely, I started reconsidering my character models. This was, admittedly, not on my list of things to do for BYTE but a lot of the other things I have on my list feel like production things, and I’m trying to step away from full production for a couple of months and start experimenting with things. Also staring at my character models finally drove me insane.

Constantly looking at Jonathan’s stupid 2-polygon collar that looks like a rendering accident and Dracula’s weird, confusing popped cape collar that is there, I guess, finally motivated me to actually redo my models. I started researching how low poly models are supposed to be modeled and tried to be a little more intentional about the whole thing. Dracula and Jonathan in particular have some really messy meshes with honestly way more vertices than they should and I wanted to clean it all up and try adding some texture.

In-game, the new model looks a lot cleaner and I found some fabric textures to use on the suit to actually give a little texture to match the rest of the assets in the game. (I have finally decided that I like the textures and I’m leaning into it.) I also tried creating a face texture for Jonathan that was so insanely disastrous that I simply will not show it to anyone ever, but it’s a possibility that I am keeping in mind and would like to revisit at some point.

In the upcoming week, I’m going to send out another round of pitches and keep whittling away on my new character model idea. Dracula is the other model that definitely needs a substantial redo, but I want to finish Jonathan first. I’m still having some issues with my walking animation being too droopy so I would like to resolve that first.