I’m not feeling very well right now! So my pace slowed down a lot.

We managed to do most of what we set out to do in the short term, though we’re behind on the bigger fish we wanted to catch by December. There’s still a chance it happens but it’s unlikely; especially since we won’t be working for most of December (me and the programmer are going on a holiday. Gonna hang out irl for the first time in years). If we wanna get into specifics… well, it was an adventure.

So one of the bigger reasons shit got slow, aside from my well being, was that I realized I was spending whole days adjusting very little parts of the level.

It became obvious with this one because it’s mostly indoors and filled with little hallways and shortcuts… as opposed to the previous one that’s simpler and filled with outdoor scenes that are sort of easier to manage, as it avoided for the most part having intertwined geometry where one wall was also another room’s wall and so on.

Something had to change. Probuilder is great, but for blocking and iterating quickly on a large map it actually kinda sucks.

With Probuilder everything is destructive. If you open a hole in a wall it’s gonna stay that way and if you wanna edit something you’ll have to do it all over again. Not optimal at all. And it gets worse when I have to manage so many objects to the point where if I want to make changes it means a wall will now be clipping into the floor above, or accidentally make things too small and the player can’t get through a door. Fixing these issues would take me a looooong time, so I looked for something better.

Enter the magic of CSG-based level design tools.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I learned level design using Probuilder. I didn’t have experience making stuff for Quake or Half-Life or anything of the sort, so this was my first time giving this method a shot.

Made me feel like motherfucking Piccolo taking off the heavy cape.

CSG is short for Constructive Solid Geometry. Without going into much detail, it allows me to carve rather clean geometry that’s easy to manage and edit without worrying about messing things up. If I want something changed I simply move it around.

This is all old school stuff that I knew about but didn’t think much of until I got tired of the struggle.

The result is a rather big and complex level compared to the previous one; made with staggering speed at that. At least for me.

Only issue is that the editor is fucky sometimes but I’ll live. Probuilder fucks up too, and Unity itself as well. I basically work with broken tools all the time. It also makes levels look very Quake-esque so I need to watch out for that… been proud of the organic feel of my maps and I’d hate to lose that.

So yeah that’s why I’m so optimistic when it comes to finishing levels and the game’s content. Feels like we hit a stride in production not just because of this tool, but by improving the way we approach milestones and an assortment of bottlenecks.

As for what’s going on with me, I like to avoid talking about personal stuff since that ain’t nobody’s business, though I have to admit that running out of outlets to rant is getting to me. I’ll say it was related to mental health, wrist pain and a whole lot of frustration on some other things in my life.

This month we would like to finish the third level, or at least have as much as we can before we hit the road. The previous plan was to have level 4 ready by mid december but that’s going to be very hard so I’m no longer counting on it, and I don’t wanna work while I’m out there in the wild.

Next year’s gonna be crucial as we aim to be content complete. Not gonna give a public timetable since there’s so many aspects of the game that we have to balance, but things are still looking up.

Pretty sure that was the aim for this year too, lol… but we were working in a slightly different way last year, plus I had a host of issues preventing me from working as much as I wanted.

Omake:

In order to quickly learn to use the new tool, I created an empty project and started to fool around during a whole weekend. Dunno if I’ll make something out of this but the time I spent on it felt like state of trance. Just me jumping and walking around. Iterating and learning. It was fun; even if it was super simple.

I love to experiment and the excitement of pushing my skills in different ways, so it sucks I can’t get more of that rush due to a certain black cloud looming over my head. It makes it hard to freely show off what I’m doing outside of this journal, and can’t help but feel very jealous of the cool things I see on Twitter all the time from devs without the baggage I created for myself.

Maybe one day I’ll get to join that fun again.

This month I also worked another Ludum Dare with my good friend Chris. click on the picture below to play it.

It somehow won #1 in visuals so we must be doing something right.