Apologies for a belated entry. I was a little bit on that loop of “I’ll write the blog tomorrow” until now.
The past couple months have been a tiny lil bit uneventful in a good way, as in, we’ve been locked in working on the game’s content and polishing localization quirks, among other things. One important part though has been polishing the introductory level a bit more by elevating the environmental/visual storytelling of it, with more fitting enemy units and assets that reflect why it looks the way it does. This was supposed to be tackled after I was done blocking out every level of the game, but there’s an event coming soon that we signed up for. Can’t say which, but we should be getting an email soon to see if we got approved at all.
Thing is, that first chapter is the whole-ass demo and I want it to be as close as it can be to what might be in the final game. This includes a finalized balance, and like I said some more fitting enemy units and cooler visual storytelling. Adjusted dialogues too, added a few more impressive vistas and lots of new camera angles; even a mid boss encounter that wasn’t there and we kinda did that in a very short time. We love the way it came out and the pace it added to the game, so we’re gonna make sure to have that sort of stopgap before the big boss at the end of each level.
This enemy unit went from concept to battle-ready in what feels like a flash. It’s not that we have the best industry tools for enemy creation; far from it. We just got better when it comes to making the most out of the project’s self-imposed limitations. I’m sure at a higher fidelity all of this would take a longer time, but as it stands, battle encounters can be as varied as time and priorities allow.
This one was also ridiculously fast to make. Concept, modeling, animation and implementation took roughly two-three days, with fine tuning in the following days in between other tasks. Keep in mind that I’m only one guy doing half of those tasks, with the programmer taking care of the implementation.
One fun thing I did here was to bake ambient occlusion to an image map in Blender. Then I painted on top of it. I could show you the fully textured model but I don’t wanna pull the curtain that far.
Been working on chapter 5 too but I had to pause it in order to polish what’s gonna be seen in the upcoming event. I think I can already go back to it. Seen above: How a level looks like when I’m prototyping. Gray boxing basically means blocking out the environment with basic geometry to get a rough idea of what it’s going to look like later, keeping it simple enough to make changes on the fly without committing to anything; although I still have problems with that very often, where sometimes a particular corner looks so good I wanna show at all costs at the expense of the map quality. I’m being careful with that, but sometimes it slips. Artist quirk, I guess.
I also like to add some preliminary mood to it, along with designing things around interesting angles. This is by far the most time consuming part of the game because it also involves the logic side, with doors, NPCs and battle placement. That’s why I repeat myself so much in that once this phase is done, the rest of the game might as well be made in [redacted] months.
Polishing is definitely the most fun and easy to do part based on the one map good-looking enough to show around. The bottleneck is honestly that we’re only two people putting together the game itself, and I have no idea how to hire or manage people to help. On that end we’ve also been making the game much more lean to have less things to manage and worry about, and it turns out the extra fat wasn’t helping our goals so that’s a nice coincidence.
March also marked the release of my new title “in the grace of our malice”. Come check it out here.
April was less productive ’cause I was spending time with my folks. Hadn’t seen them in years! But I’m pretty sure the spider enemy was completed in the second half of it. I also took some time to work on experiments.
I think that’s all. I’m gonna leave the May log for the end of the month. It ain’t over yet and I’m in the midst of a lotta things.
Omake:
Some shots from the intro cutscene I’ve been working on. Still in rough draft state.
A sneak peek to one of the areas in the first chapter. I tried to upload the raw clip here but it wasn’t embedding for whatever reason. Twitter embed wasn’t working either so Tumblr it is.