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Showing posts from June, 2019

Pride Month: Mental Health and Mental Illness in the LGBTQ+ Population

           At Somnova, we're in the business of having candid discussions of mental health. Awareness and understanding are the first steps toward resolving mental health issues, and even basic knowledge of community problems can go a long way toward promoting better outcomes. It's natural, then, that we should discuss the mental health situation of LGBTQ+ individuals for pride month. Before we proceed, I'll warn that the following discussion contains mentions of sexual assault, suicide, homophobia, and transphobia. We'll jump right in.  That there is a mental health crisis in the LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and otherwise “queered”) population is no controversy. The Human Rights Campaign Foundation reports, in one study of LGBTQ+ youth, that 28% of youth report feeling depressed “most or all of the time” during the previous 30 days, as compared to 12% of other youth [1]. In a different study, those in the LGBTQ+ population were found t

Missing Stars June Update

Hello everyone, hope you're doing well. We're coming at you with our June update for Missing Stars so that we can keep you informed of our progress for Act 1. What we focused on this month was going through our code and streamlining it in order to make it more efficient and help run the game better. What we did to achieve this was we took some commands that were 6-7 lines long that popped up throughout the game's code and shortened them to 1-2 lines. This was done not only to streamline the code, but make sure it was easier to read and sort through when adding in scenes, as well as make troubleshooting to solve any bugs that pop up a lot easier. On top of that, we have programmed in a number of scenes into the game and are continuing to make progress on that front. Some users on Discord were asking abut how tall (or short) some of our cast members are. By popular demand, here's a relative height chart of our core cast for Missing Stars! And that is all we ha