You know what my favorite thing in game development is? Wasting a whole day troubleshooting something. With favorite i meant less favorite.

The thing is that so far two off-the-shelf shaders have been giving me a lotta static. There’s the popular psxeffects or whatever it’s called that shits the bed quite bigly for mysterious reasons, then there’s flatkit that outright breaks unity for some reason. And look, i’m not gonna blame the devs, it could very well be our fault, but one thing is certain and that thing is… they gotta go! so i’m now not using any ps1 tricks or any of that stuff, not for the time being anyway. I could rollback any moment now because it’s not that hard to switch between visual styles outside color tweaks, but right now i wanna focus on a workflow that’s not going to betray me while we work on the meat and potatoes. So, for the environments i’ll just be using the bakery standard shader for better results with the precalculated lighting and realToon for the characters.

The results so far are pretty great.

I made a quick normal map for her textures just to check how it looks. Gotta adjust some bits here and there but i dig it.

A couple folks mentioned this is now looking like a psp game but frankly i don’t think i’m targetting a strict look from any console or era, i’m just doing (as always) what i think works best with the story that i want to tell, and for cyberpunk the game must look crusty as hell, be 3d or 2d. It’s gotta look dirty or it doesn’t feel cyberpunk for me.

Anyway, aside from these visual tweaks and the set up for the blank project we are using now i’ve also been knee deep adjusting some lore details before diving into the next chapter’s script. I’m debating whether i should do chapter 2 or 5 since they both have interesting challenges i’d like to tackle but i’ll see tomorrow.

I wish we could go at the same pace as late last year. Maybe we are and we just don’t know but so far it feels like we are dragging our feet super hard. I did finish two whole-ass scripts though, that’s a massive amount of work but my brain probably registers it as nothing cuz i’m always sitting and writing on the computer at any given time.

Anyway, catch you tomorrow if i update.