Not a whole lot of substance happened last month outside of a fully playable second chapter. Sounds big but again, big part of it was already done last year. “All we did” this time around was place the finalized enemy units, including the mid boss encounter, the boss fight itself, plus all the story content including the internet segment; a recurring part of the loop some people might know about. Come to think of it, have I ever explained the game’s loop? Well, I can do that some other day.

Something that also happened since the last log was a change we did in scene loading that had catastrophic effects and left the game unplayable for longer than I’d like to admit. I felt very, very dispirited to see the game so broken cuz it wasn’t just scene loading; a ton of bugs suddenly had the game feeling like it did two years ago and I wanted to jump out the window. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed, we fixed everything little by little and the game is stable once again.

Anyway, there’s still a ton of polishing to be done for the second chapter, but judging by my previous experience, prettying things up is not that time consuming at this level of fidelity. What’s time consuming is adjusting the level based on feedback since I gotta create and move cameras around, which is a genuine pain in the ass.

On that end… I think it’s time we start compromising a little bit in order to ship. I haven’t decided yet on this, but my plan for now is to kinda trust my gut and that of the staff regarding level readability and flow. If we get stuck forever tweaking these maps it will be another five years till this game ships and nobody wants that.

Not everything has to be compromised, though. Part of scaling back on level design (just a tiny bit) is to put all that effort on battle design and scenarios; the true meat of the game alongside the story I want to tell.

We did add new stuff. Well, dodging is a little old at this point, but now it’s properly balanced and we gave it some nice visual effects. Still gotta implement a cool sound effect to go with it, but that’s June’s field.

A new enemy unit. We usually settle on a base enemy model per chapter and give them different weapons and behaviors, then do some sort of palette swap. Sometimes we just leave them as is. Kind of a testament to our current efficiency that this guy went from a blank, textureless doll to a fully designed enemy in the blink of an eye.

I think most enemies are shorter than Reila, come to think of it.

By the way if you see that the textures look a little blurry in this devlog, that’d be me playing around with filters. At the end I’ll probably ship the game with no option to change this. Without the raw pixels a lot of the grit goes away and this not a soft game by any means.

It was still pretty fun to look at the game like this. Now it’d be a bonafide PSP title. PS2 even.

Speaking of sixth generation aesthetics, I’ve been playing around with shaders a lot more lately.

Here I made a shader that uses a cubemap to fake speculars. Perfect when the game has no realtime lighting whatsoever.

I’m using this on the characters too. Reila specifically is covered in black leather, so it was a must.

Part of what makes it look cool is that this shine is mapped to what’s supposed to be shiny. Notice how the clothing below the jacket has a matte finish.

I have to adjust how shiny it can get though. Can look a little over the top.

I forgot to mute the recording. The song in the background is just stuff I listen to while working.

More shader goodness, this time it’s a very Xbox adjacent water. Reminds me of Panzer Dragoon Orta; in my opinion one of the best looking games of that generation.

It’s fun to stray away from PS1 limitations, though in all fairness, sticking to that fidelity was never really an explicit goal. In my mind it’s kinda like va11halla; a game made for a console or platform that never existed. I’m also trying to be tasteful when more “modern” techniques show up. Everything has to look consistent or else I’ll go nuts.

There’s a lot more that we did since the last dev log but much of it would constitute spoilers, so I’ll wrap things up for now.

By the way, I’ve been posting screenshots on my bluesky and our discord server that I might have forgotten for this entry, so if you’re interested in seeing more, then you know what to do.

Overall the project is going well. We’re very optimistic about our pace despite missing an internal deadline. Nothing that locking in can’t solve.

Omake: