Grind goes on as always and I’ve been keeping myself busy with a lot of animation work (in large part adjusting stuff from zero since I did it quite shoddily in the previous iteration of the project). I’m almost done though, just need to go over the non-root motion stuff and come to a decision on which one we want for the finalized controls. There’s arguments in favor and against using root motion for movement but at the end it will come down to both testing and ease of use during development.

Also had a call with newprogrammer to go over the final gameplay modules and features. In the past year we’ve been experimenting a lot; saw a lot of failure and a lot of success, but it’s time we buckle down and choose what’s gonna make the cut. Things are looking up! Now it comes down to how we want the game loop to be handled from a tools standpoint. At the start I didn’t wanna make a game with a traditional loop but I’ve realized that at least for this one it’s something we can’t live without. What we got right now then is a hub-ish design; sorta kinda like Astral Chain if you’ve played that. This was always the plan, but as I wrote I realized I wasn’t treating it as such plus our tools weren’t up to speed. For example, how will the tools manage as the game goes along?: Change NPC dialogue, available NPC’s upon entering a map, available places to go, items available at stores, which player data will be carried accross chapters? and so on. After we are done refactoring and cleaning up what we have pending we’ll plan the solutions for the aforementioned problems on paper before writing a line of code. Once a consensus is reached I can go back to writing the rest of the chapters taking these final design choices into account, hopefully finish before newprogrammer is done with said final tools and then we build the game (this time for real, we’ve had like two or three false starts if this blog is anything to go by).

I realize that a lot of this should have been done before a single asset was made, but we are still amateurs and this is our first action-ish game; one that’s also in 3D. Thankfully we have the resources to take as much time as possible to get it right, tho I’m still a madman who wants to ship this year.

Last but not least, Project X just suffered a major setback and it’s possible we might have to ice it until the stars align. Won’t go much into detail but let’s hope that’s not the case. It’s a huge morale blow for me because I like to work on several games at the same time for mental health reasons. When a project becomes overwhelming the smaller one becomes a comfort game… and X was just that for me. It was in incredibly capable hands and I was mostly drawing /giving light direction (like I said, it was in capable hands).

I’m crazy, man. I love making games and I make games to relax. How does that even work?

Time to bounce. Here are some screenies showcasing the new shader for characters and equippable items. I love it.