If anyone’s asking: Yes, the eternal July is still on-going, but we keep on trucking.
What if I just shared a cool set every time I write these? Guido Sartoris is from the local scene and his taste is impeccable. He’s actually having a set with mother effin’ Juan Atkins this weekend. Fucked up good.
Feels like I say this every time I write a dev diary, but it’s a fact that the game’s development picked up dramatically once everything fell into place. Things I thought were gonna take longer were in fact not that hard to do, like the “type B” cutscenes. I essentially finished most of the planned ones, so the next step is to complete all boss fights before I work on the cooler “type A” cutscenes.
Type A: Involves intricate animation and camera angles. Movies, basically.
Type B: These work with canned animations, has minimal camera work and movement is reduced to only the necessary. You have to manually advance dialogue. (None of this is industry lingo btw; I made it all up)
Think of the difference you see in games like Yakuza, where side missions are presented in a different way than the movies.
Boss fights are definitely the hardest part of development right now. It’s also super fun so we don’t mind. All we do is test the game over a call and tweak whatever we see off.
My hope is that we can wrap up all of these battles by sometime in October. Somewhat doubtful…
We’ll see.
We did a ton more this month. Like, I was finally able to work on so many things I’ve been delaying for a long time, and font rendering was definitely at the top of my “I’ll get to this later” list.
My indie peers that also happen to work with low res 3D probably know what I’m about to discuss here. The fact that you either need to use pixel art fonts to keep things consistent with the game’s resolution, or use a high-res font for everything UI and forget about it.
Nothing against pure pixel art fonts, but man, they just didn’t fit that well in this game for a lot of the elements, like dialogue and in-game websites.
Usually the way I fix this is by using a physical canvas that’s affected by post-processing, but I learned that method after the fact, and the game handles a TON of canvases, and they’re coded a certain way and bla bla.
Too much work.
Then the other day I woke up from a dream and it all came to me: “Can I use bitmap fonts with text mesh pro?”
You can, but it’s weird, and it’s boring to explain why.
I’ll just cut to the chase and tell you how to use normal fonts in your epic PS1 style game.
Let’s say I wanna use this font. Sure, drop it inside a canvas. The problem is that once you display the game at a higher resolution while using an overlay canvas, the text will look crispier than the rest of the game; doesn’t matter if you use a low resolution canvas and your 3D is low res; the text doesn’t give a shit.
Okay, grab the font file and make the resolution smaller.
Nope.
Text mesh pro will do some weird filtering to it and it will look like this. Definitely not what we want.
Okay, we’re getting somewhere. What I did here is I grabbed the font we just converted to low resolution (36 pixels here), choose smooth_hinted as its render mode, then set its shader to bitmap. That was the keyword all along, bitmap!
Now all you have to do is set the texture atlas’ filtering to point and…
That’s a bingo!
Is that the way you say it? “That’s a Bingo”?
Ignore how it looks a little distorted, it all depends on the font. The point is that now I can finally use any font I want and have it look consistent with the rest of the game. I’m still using some pixel art fonts for the smaller text of course, but it’s no longer obligatory.
Now… I wouldn’t call this a victory. It’s actually wake up call: These engines, Unity, Unreal, whatever the fuck; They’re not your friends, and I think as developers we should start spreading more knowledge on how to make our own tools instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
All this time I could have done this and have the game look cooler, but it took me a vision quest while sleeping to remember that bitmap fonts existed and start experimenting with the settings.
I’d really love it if I could just do this type of shit myself from scratch on a whim instead of fighting someone else’s program, but whatever.
This is how dialogues look now. All a work in progress of course.
Gonna keep playing around with the typography for months to come I feel.
How it used to look like. I also changed the window since I’m playing around with that too.
Oh yeah, the game has working planar reflections now, and you best believe I’ll abuse the shit out of it whenever I need shiny surfaces.
I’ve no idea if this will work on consoles; that will be the problem of whoever ports this. I know for a fact it works awesome on the Steam Deck.
(I don’t think there’s a legit reason it shouldn’t, I was just worrying that Proton was gonna throw a fit)
On that note, our priority and main target is PC at the moment. Further versions will be outsourced if there’s demand.
I don’t remember if I mentioned this here, but we’ll be self-publishing 45PB, and that means a lot less resources for ports.
People who follow us on social media were also privy of this old-school ad I made for the game.
For this I used artwork from way back in 2017; before the game even had one line of code written.
45PB was nothing but cool ideas and vibes in 2017, and actual development wouldn’t begin until 2020; Though I like to think production started in 2022; that’s when we locked in the current direction.
Okay, time to wrap this up.
In short:
There’s 4 bosses yet to be designed and implemented, once we finish these encounters I’ll devote myself to Type A cutscenes and environment/level design polish. There’s sound design too but I’ll do that in tandem with the rest.
Current main worry aside from boss fights is that the story is a little wack and I need to play this from start to end with the story in place to see what needs to be trimmed (working on it, as chapter 5 needs a little rewrite that affects chapter 6).
That’s really it. 45PB feels like it will finish production not too that far into the future, even though we still gotta do heavy QA and localization before we commit to a release date.
Making games is hard, guys. Holy shit.
I also wouldn’t want to do anything else. We’re cooking, trust.