This is a bit more of a random, lighthearted devlog - not really much about progress, but some brainworms I've been itching to get out.

I played through the La-Mulana series recently, which inspired me to incorporate a lot more aspects of real world civilizations, one of which has been the culture of the Ainu people of Hokkaido. For those who don't know, the Ainu are an indigenous people to Hokkaido and, for a time, were threatened with cultural extinction due to subjugation and colonialism from the Japanese. Thankfully this has begun to reverse course and more of their culture is being preserved in respectful ways (both in law and in society), and I've been doing quite a bit of research on their ways of life and beliefs in an effort to spread awareness of them and their situation. 

Doing so has been a fun, but also extremely difficult challenge. One thing I quickly noted was that the Ainu people spent a long time being forced to 'perform' exaggerated aspects of their culture for museum tourists and such in order to stay afloat in then-modern day Japan, and as such I wanted to do what I could to avoid playing into that orientalist attitude towards displaying cultures I'm not intimately familiar with. I believe I've done a good job at avoiding disrespectful depictions of such, but due to the game being so late in development, all I found I could really do is some specific areas reference Ainu culture and mythology, as well as having people of Ainu decent factor into the game's lore. It's quite a bare bones and admittedly shallow representation, and in future projects I want to continue to represent their culture in ways that I plan from the start, in order to do more to spread awareness of their culture in addition to cool-looking areas and cultural tidbits. 

This brings me to the other part of this devlog - another part of development I've been having a bit of fun with has been the enemies. Another important aspect of La-Mulana that I took from was the idea of enemies from real world mythology being represented within the game. For enemies, I've mainly been pulling inspiration from Abrahamic religions and writings, as well as medieval depictions of animals. The three main reasons for this are:

1) I find their depictions in artwork of the time to be incredibly fascinating. Have you seen what these people thought frogs looked like??

2) I'm a lot more familiar with these kinds of monsters and depictions of animals than in other cultures, and as much as I want to depict interesting facets of lesser known cultures, I'd rather not just pull from a culture I know comparatively little about and simply hope I'm not showcasing a revered deity as some sort of common malicious scrub. 

3) This actually factors somewhat into accessibility, interestingly enough. Because a lot of these depictions are wacky as hell, they hopefully won't trigger the kinds of phobias you usually see (spiders, bees, wasps, etc). I've seen some *wacky* attempts at drawing bees from the medieval era, and trust me. They do not look very much like bees.

In the end, I'm trying to push my boundaries more and explore more kinds of possibilities for my game. I can't guarantee I will be successful with everything, but I will try my best to make the game's areas and lore fascinating but also respectful to the cultures I'm pulling from.