Consider this the dev log for December 2025 and January 2026. Also, check out this set that helped me grind a big chunk of work in the past month!

What it says on the tin.

Today marks the day where every single story event and encounter is now fully playable. A lot of polishing awaits us and don’t get me wrong— it’s a ton of work! but it’s all far more predictable.

No new content will be added, no new sections. Just bug fixing and making things look pretty or play/read better. QOL improvements, optimization, editing, localization. Like I said, it’s a ton, just more predictable.

If everything goes well we’ll divulge a release date in a couple months.

Stay tuned!

This is definitely my favorite part of development, and I’m getting that feel I had when we were about wrap up VA-11 Hall-A’s development; with a combination of good anxiety and bad anxiety.

The only difference is that we’re self-publishing this time, so a ton more is falling on our shoulders. We’re betting on ourselves, and we have no clue if it’s gonna be worth it by the end of it.

This current stage implies more grind than problem solving, so don’t expect me to talk much from here unless catastrophic things happen that make us rewrite systems or something. Or funny anecdotes. Let’s hope for funny anecdotes!

Wish us luck, too.

Oh yeah, we’ve been recording footage to cut a couple of trailers with. I’d venture to say that the season where we’ll be very annoying about this game is fastly approaching.

Can’t wait to unleash this into the world. We’ve been working on 45pb for a good chunk of our lives, even though this was supposed to be a quick 2-year project….. LOL… how innocent we were.

While the game is still very low-key and made with obvious budget and time constraints, most the dev time was spent straight up learning how to even make a 3D game in the first place. It’s the first time we do something even remotely similar to what you see, so yeah, it was bound to take its sweet freaking time.

I do not plan to make games for longer than two years after this, though. I’m confident in our new style of development and I’m confident in our tools as well. I’m sure future dev cycles will be very normal.

Let’s aim for the top!

I realized that I didn’t share a set last month. Here’s a really good one from Perc, who played at my favorite club in the city of fury earlier in the year.

A couple weeks removed from actual November, but here we are.

As mentioned in the last entry, at least half of November was meant to be a break for me, and it was! Had a ton of fun going to Iguazú and the Bôa concert in Buenos Aires, which was amazing! as expected from such a beloved band that’s finally getting their flowers thanks to the magic of the wired.

Can’t help but get emotional thinking about the many many life experiences I’d be missing out on hadn’t I escaped my country of origin…

While I was on my break, our programmer had been taking care of a long list of tasks, until some small hiccups affected his ability to lock in. Things are OK now, but they could be better.

Said tasks mostly concerned the wonky UI and controls during battle that made it difficult to choose between items and spells, among other more pressing issues with the game’s balance. I also really appreciate that he took the time to write this long document, detailing how the numbers should be dealt with as the player progresses through the game, plus suggested item availability and recommended amount of money that should be earned per battle. This is one of my weak points (bad at math) so I’m super grateful that he took the time to do it for me.

Shoutouts to his girlfriend for being a really good tester!

Before I went on my break I mostly wrote some new scenes and made some motion capture tests with Mocopi, to mixed results.

Tried to replicate that one Tyler dance to funny results.

I don’t think I’ll be using this for full production, but it was fun to mess around with it. Maybe I’m missing something with the calibration? Like this thing deadass didn’t wanna capture something as simple as sitting down.

I’ll deal with it properly in due time. In the mean time I have to take care of setting up what’s going to be the new intro to the game, among many other tasks.

As for the contents: we’re almost there! There’s only one boss left, plus the remaining narrative sections and their updated dialogues. Still a ton of work, but we’ve been through worse.

That’s all for now! See you all in January.

The news that are most relevant to you all though is definitely the fact we shattered our own expectations regarding the boss fight design and implementation.

We initially thought they’d be ready by December or something, and that end of October seemed like too tight of a deadline considering past experiences.

Well, we’ve been working on the last boss fight for like a week or so, and only stopped to stabilize the enemy behavior scripts. Virtually all of the important game content is implemented, barring some new scenes I wrote to fill some gaps I forgot were there, and the last playable scene. So, not quite content complete yet… but close.

Development will likely slow down a little in November as I want to take a little break, though the programmer will continue the grind with the final boss. My computer also blew up and I’ve been using my laptop as a backup, so no environment polishing on my end until I take care of that.

What’s next after the game reaches content completion? Let me repeat myself: Balance, polish, heavy testing and localization, among many other things that could either make development faster or slower.

There’s also the game’s story. The whole script is in dire need of an editing pass and that’s what I’m working on as I write this, alongside Sukeban’s manager Taku, who’s gonna be in Argentina for the rest of the month.

Honestly impressive so much was achieved. We went from thinking we could MAYBE have the fourth boss fight done by early November, but the gamedev demons posessed our souls and got to the 7th in what feels like a blink.

I also got a hold of a motion capture thingie I’ve been meaning to test for a while and it’s been hit or miss. I’ll explain that on the next dev log.

In all honesty, October was incredible productivity-wise and I don’t know if I can go back to a long distance thing. Feedback is so instant and things move so fast. Plus the energy of listening to music and cracking jokes with friends as we build something cool next to each other is super invigorating. Makes me wanna do my best.

There’s still so much I want to write about, but this will have to do for now. Between work and having fun it’s been hard to find a space for myself to chill and write these. Catastrophic events in my personal life aside, it’s been good. Real good.

In non-45pb news, one of the Va11hallA collabs I was talking about in another dev log is already on going with the Astral Party DLC. The other one should be arriving early next year. What game could it be?

That’s it for now. Bye!

Here’s an excellent set by Mari Sakurai to a crowd that refused to dance for some reason.

September was a weird month. Some good progress mixed with long periods of inactivity thanks to a bad July that doesn’t want to end.

tl;dr: my personal life has been in shambles for months.

Things got a lot easier eventually, and several sources of major stress are not there anymore, for which I’m thankful like you wouldn’t believe.

At one point life felt asphyxiating; like the walls of my apartment were closing in on me, with no exit in sight.

I’m glad I can breath again.

While I’m not fully out of the woods yet, work can resume as usual… this time with the programmer to my side!

That’s right, for a month and change we’ll be working together at the little room I call an office in Buenos Aires, and so far the results are promising, with tasks that would usually take us weeks being realized in only a couple days (sometimes hours) thanks to quick feedback and good vibes.

Just yesterday we were working on the 4th boss fight over jokes, delicious coffee and Faye Webster music, who’s my current obsession.

Work is fun, if you can believe it.

Going back to what we did in September: We concluded work on the 2nd and 3rd boss fights. The 3rd one had some rough patterns already, but we did the rest shortly before and after the programmer arrived to Argentina; including modeling, texturing and animation. The second phase, if you can call it that, was done in a couple hours. I love the little sequence we made for this battle.

We’re almost done with the 4th boss fight as of this writing, and we expect to start the 5th one next week. (I need to remind everyone that we have 7th boss fights planned for this game.)

Now, I don’t wanna get ahead of myself here, but what if we pushed through and actually implemented every boss by late October? Wouldn’t that be crazy?

Let’s hope that happens.

I can’t really show or say much about September aside from what I just wrote. Posting screenshots will spoil surprises, and to be honest we didn’t do that much during the first half for reasons outside of our control like I said at the beginning.

What’s important is that we’re healthy and on schedule once more, working hard to reach this next milestone. Priorities right now are entirely focused on boss fights, balance and writing. The story needs a third pass so bad, like, it’s genuinely whack right now but it’s nothing I can’t structure properly once it’s time to do a full run of the game like we did not that long ago.

That’s it for now.

Peace!

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.

Very good mix I listened to while writing this entry.

Big milestone, gamers: I’m done putting together the game’s sixth and seventh chapters. That means the game is playable from start to end. Well, it will be on Monday, when we do some plumbing and start linking chapter 5 with 6, and 6 with 7. It’s minutes-worth of work.

Let’s grab the list from last month to see where we are.

• Finish remaining enemies (create models, rigs, textures and code behaviors)
  • Remaining normal enemies that use custom models are kind of finished, we just need to add more classes to an existing group, then throw them into the last level.
• Finish implementation of fights and puzzles for the last two chapters (this would make the whole game playable from start to end. Alpha build?)
  • This is done.
• Finish remaining boss fights (create models, rigs, textures, code their behaviors and design the fights)
  • This is what we’re gonna focus on moving forward. It’s by far the most challenging task at this stage of development.
• Environment and asset polish (includes baking final lighting for all maps, getting rid of placeholder models, etc.)
  • Will do after we’re out of the woods with the boss fights, but I’ll keep tweaking every level and animation etc. here and there until the very end anyway. It’s a perpetual work in progress.
• Sound polish (finalize music mixing, environment sounds, sound effects, etc.)
  • Only one level has proper sound design and I need to lock in with this. Shouldn’t take me very long with June’s help.
• Implement and polish remaining cinematic sequences and narrative sections
  • Will work on this throughout August in between boss fight design and testing.
• Heavy QA, balancing.
  • It’s ramping up this month.
• Hit beta state. This will kickstart a different roadmap towards the game’s release.
  • I’ve no idea when this will happen. Well, I do, I just don’t wanna say.

The incredible part of it all is that we’re a whole month ahead of schedule. Our forecast was to reach this stage in September, but the 7th chapter is an oddity that was also mostly functional since last year. And things could have gone faster, but July was mentally taxing. Still is! My July just keeps going on and on.

Recent experience does make it very clear where the bottleneck is, though. If we ever make a game like this again, I’ll definitely hire a level designer that can also help with game design. I’m wearing way too many hats that I’m happy to wear, but it makes development take such a long time, and I’m running out of it. There’s just not enough time for everything I wanna do in life. I need to stop messing around and learn how to delegate more.

Going back to development talk, chapter six was challenging. Like, REALLY challenging. It’s still in a rough state, but I finally reached a point where I’m sort of happy with the way it flows.

The thing is that many of these battles really do push players to use all items they’ve been holding onto, and also makes them tweak Reila’s build in a way previous stages didn’t (for the most part), so I’ll apply the lessons learned here for early battles. It’s gonna be fun since it’s a matter of numbers and fun enemy combinations.

Chapter 7 balance is still funky, as enemies only deal very little damage on fully upgraded armors. I gotta sit down and do some proper math.

I’m excited to start working on bosses, story and and atmosphere stuff. It’s what I do best, and the forecast is very optimistic. The game’s release is no longer in some nebulous future. It hasn’t been for a while, but you know what I mean.

One step at a time.

Here’s a cute Anna I drew (forma de .45 PARABELLUM BLOODHOUND)

In unrelated news to 45PB: If things go well, this second half of the year should see some very interesting collabs involving va11halla, as well as a merch thingie (unrelated to va11halla) that we’ve been meaning to push out since December. Hope you guys like it.

See you all next month, and pray that my terrible July ends soon.

Shoutouts to Daniel of the Lamp #weebobeebogaming

Well, that’s exactly what we did. It took longer than we thought, but it was pretty much four weeks of locking in, changing numbers and fixing a billion bugs.

The verdict? Well, the game is fully playable up until the end of chapter 5. And I’ve said many times before how this or that level is playable or polished, etc. but there’s a big difference here: I’m talking about starting a new game, and going through it like a normal player would instead of using debug tools and shortcuts. A LOT was broken and prevented me from progressing, but we fixed things as we went and the game is very stable as of now.

I obviously have to see other people that don’t know the game very well play 45pb and gauge their reactions, but so far? It was better balanced than I initially thought. The trickiest part is making money, since it’s possible to get soft locked by seemingly impossible fights.

Example: Let’s say there’s three enemies that will (unintentionally) hit you no matter what you do. You could try to tank it and dodge as much as possible, but eventually you’ll perish. You could upgrade your armor, or buy a new implant or skill that makes that particular fight easier, but you lose money when you die. Players will then try to find other fights to make that money back, but what if there isn’t any other encounter to do so? That’s the sort of scenario I saw at least once, and I know the game like the palm of my hand, so it’s safe to assume there’s similar bottlenecks elsewhere.

By the way, I already know how to adjust this; I’m just describing the sorta thing we’re actively trying to find so the game can be completed with a reasonably upgraded Reila by the end of it.

I did see it’s possible to do a no-upgrade run; it’s just incredibly difficult to pull it off.

Difficult AND tedious. Dealing damage with a base gun on latter enemies that have more defense and HP is cock ball torture. You will literally deal 1-5 damage on dudes with 500+ HP.

But hey, I’ve seen people plat games that do even worse things.

The 8 million storage keys incident

During chapter 5 I kept noticing how the game was getting increasingly slow. Loading screens kept getting longer, and triggering battles would tank the frame rate into the teens. Fucked up stuff.

We got worried. Is there a memory leak? Could be, but it doesn’t make sense. The game doesn’t degrade over time, no. If the game was slow when you exit chapter 5, then it will be slow when you load it back again. And up until then we had been playing for a solid five to six hours with no slowdown issues or long loading times. So what exactly is going on?

The engine’s console describes every step of the game’s programming. It registers what happens during battles, when you change scenes, and all of that. That’s how I noticed the game checks for the inventory when you enter a fight or while loading a saved game; The two common scenarios where the game would start chugging like crazy.

The programmer took a look, and there they were: Eight million “storage keys” from the previous dungeon, bloating the save file to a deathly degree (it even crashed the engine several times).

The game struggled HARD to load them all, and to top it all off, they kept duplicating every frame and we had no clue about when it began to do so.

Maybe something happened when going from chapter 4 to 5? That must be it.

Then it kept happening with a completely different item!

I’m not gonna bore you with details of how it was fixed. I’m also not the programmer of the project and I wouldn’t be able to recall the process done. But the end result was a deep refactoring of the data management side. And at the end of it we accidentally laid the ground for a New Game + mode. I’m not sure we’ll pull the trigger on that, but it’s not that crazy a possibility anymore.

Despite it all, the game ended up in a very healthy place. We saw how much of the actual game we neglected due to working almost exclusively in “developer mode”, which we’ll definitely take note of for the next project. I was also able to work on texturing new enemies, implement remaining puzzles and fights for chapter 5 (plus some environment polish), extra groundwork for chapter 6, as well as brainstorming a little for the game’s ending.

(The ending is already written (has been for a long time), we just needed to hammer down some of the more minute details so certain scenes don’t feel out of place or out of character.)

The fight ahead

This month of July I’m going back to the usual grind, and do my best to finish the encounters for the last two stages and whatever else I see that could be important.

The roadmap ahead kinda looks like this right now:

• Finish remaining enemies (create models, rigs, textures and code behaviors)
• Finish implementation of fights and puzzles for the last two chapters (this would make the whole game playable from start to end. Alpha build?)
• Finish remaining boss fights (create models, rigs, textures, code their behaviors and design the fights)
• Environment and asset polish (includes baking final lighting for all maps, getting rid of placeholder models, etc.)
• Sound polish (finalize music mixing, environment sounds, sound effects, etc.)
• Implement and polish remaining cinematic sequences and narrative sections
• Heavy QA, balancing.
• Hit beta state. This will kickstart a different roadmap towards the game’s release.

Now, this list is extremely optimistic and reductive, since development can hit any kind of obstacles and things are far more complex than drawing a circle and then the rest of the owl. But from a bird’s view, this is what we need to do to finish 45PB. It’s a lot! But many of these items can be done in a month depending on the complexity. In my experience, boss fights will be the hardest to get right.

We have a loose idea of how long this is gonna take, and so far we’re on schedule for a change. Things are going well, and I guess we’ll see what July has in store for us.

I’m freaking groovin’ to this set as I write.

It’s a great day here in Buenos Aires.

Comfy temps, sunny skies and hot chocolate got me in a super whitepilled mood. So what better moment to write another developer diary?

I thought this month wouldn’t be as productive as the last one, considering I took a week off so I could go to Amsterdam for a Tyler, The Creator concert. But here we are, in the middle of fine-tuning chapter 5 and testing a new sort of design for this part of the game that I hope people will appreciate.

It certainly wasn’t on purpose that every chapter ended up being their own thing. We were hoping that by having a predictable loop development would go faster, and to a degree it did, but the way the tools are designed allowed us to play around with all sorts of scenarios without adding new features outside of small things, such as “enable game object at conversation end”. I’m frankly super happy, and I expect players to appreciate what the planned seven chapters have to offer.

Our current plan for June is to finish what we can of chapter 5, then play the game from the very beginning over and over; cut-scenes and all. This is to get an idea for the game’s “progression balance” (skill, upgrades and weapon availability; Stat numbers, money, etc.) before we jump into the final two acts, which will exploit every single mechanic we’ve added so far. All for the sake of that very specific vibe only video games can achieve: The climax where all elements come into their own.

Thinking about it, that’s really what makes the medium so special. The fact that so many disparate elements can elevate each other in ways only possible when you’re holding a controller and moving the character yourself.

I don’t think there’s much else to say. Things are going well and comically fast. The programmer told me the other day that it was a little scary that we’re so close to hitting a proper beta build during the northern hemisphere summer, which makes me wonder… When should this game release? GTA VI is definitely gonna murder conversation for months next year, and I don’t want this game to be forgotten or be treated as some “overlooked gem”, so it’s been tricky to decide.

We’ll definitely know as time goes on. There’s a chance we get ahead of our internal schedule and surprise everyone, but life (and game development) can be unpredictable, so still no promises.

Regardless of the possible wait between “release candidate” and the game’s actual release, we’ll definitely polish as much as we can in the meantime. As well as jump right away into our next “flagship” commercial video game.

That one is coming, trust me.

It puts things into perspective, like, last year I traveled and did so many things. 2024 felt extremely fulfilling and slow in a good way. 2025 has been instead all about locking in— about getting stuff done and fully focusing on finishing this game. It’s working out so far, and I think I’m more confident than ever we’ll pull this off within our internal deadline. There’s no crunch, and yet… work life is just so boring. I think if I let a camera record my daily life I’d become suicidal. I’d see that footage and feel terrible upon the realization that all I’ve been doing since January is waking up and sitting in front of a monitor.

This doesn’t mean it’s ALL I do, I’m obviously exaggerating. I go out on weekends, hang out with friends, I go to raves and concerts. This month I’m actually taking a little one-week vacation somewhere in Europe. I do my best to actually have a comfy existence, don’t get me wrong.

What I’m saying here is that making games at this scale is a lonely, boring affair.

It’s fun to put things together and see them in action. It’s fun to spend two hours figuring out cool compositions and colors. Editing dialogues where changing a word transforms the overall feel of a sentence. That’s fun. When I say it’s boring and lonely it’s because there’s this lack of a more dynamic sense of excitement and camaraderie. It’s not like filming a movie, where you go to a location with your crew to get shit done. Or going on tour with a band where you get to shoot the shit in between gigs.

This is not me glazing one profession over the other, don’t get me wrong, and similar things can happen in games. The problem is we’re indie as fuck. We got no office, everyone lives super far away from each other, and the game is designed in a way where stuff like motion capture or voice acting aren’t really that necessary. All that’s needed to build this game is to sit down and look at Unity for hours on end until it’s 5pm and my apartment starts looking like a prison.

There are some glimpses of what I want for the future, though.

When we organized Sukeban Visions in Akihabara (video coming soon, I promise) or back when we revealed 45PB at Bitsummit in Kyoto, there was this spark about it all. Like, this is how much I’m missing out on. Working with my crew in person is like, the coolest shit I can imagine, and I want more of that.

A friend once said I waste too much time worrying about what things could be instead of accepting reality. Yes, it was said in a very rude and almost insensitive way. I’m definitely sugarcoating his words. Point is, what he meant is that instead of working towards improving my current reality, all I would do is get sad and avoid moving a finger about it, and I think that’s why this doesn’t feel like I’m bitching. If anything, I’ve just identified something I don’t like about making games, and once 45PB ships, I’ll make sure to steer the ship towards a more human way of doing things. Games don’t have to be just slaving away on a computer on your own until it’s done. I think making games can be as exciting as going on tour and filming on location. Hell, even on this project I’ve had trips to insane places and done urbex just to gather textures and references, so I know it can be done.

I don’t know. Making games is awesome but boring, and I don’t want months to fly by like this ever again. I want years to be long as fuck and create cool things with my friends until I die. Fuck this computer shit, lol, idk.

Oh yeah, the game.

We’re moving onto chapter four. That’s good. We made a series of choices that I think I outlined in my last log, which is to make compromises on some aspects of level design that are frankly not worth fussing over. This is why I was able to polish chapter 3 so fast compared to chapter 2, which is still largely a gray boxed map with really cool encounters but still unfinished. Meanwhile chapter 3 is like, almost as polished as the first chapter we showed last year during Bitsummit. There’s a lot on readability that needs to be addressed, but other than that that shit’s already fire. I even underestimated the runtime because it was smaller than chapter 2 in total size, but all our playthroughs take almost an hour to complete. It’s all a good sign.

We still have to finish the boss fight, but thankfully it’s not something I have focus on all by myself and can let the programmer handle it with my direction. While he does that I can safely move onto chapter 4, see what needs to be done and lock in. The advantage this time is that I don’t have to redesign chapter 4 like I redesigned chapter 3, which had its whole layout done again from scratch. Ch4 is like an actually complete level sans finalized encounters and textures, so let’s see how long that’s gonna take us.

Had a chance as well of focusing a little bit more on writing and cutscene direction. We’re pretty proud of what we’re achieving, and we arrived to this sweet spot where we know where things are going, but now that we can afford to visualize how everything will play out on the screen, we can safely write and edit stuff to further enhance the vision instead of blindly trusting the word vomit that’s the current final draft. I do have to go back and retroactively edit some earlier dialogue, but in a genius move from our past selves, the game is not that word heavy anyway! So this sort of task is not at all stressful to me.

Enjoy these screenshots from actual in-game cutscenes and environments.

That’s it for now, see you next time.

Aside from a little distraction caused by Monster Hunter Wilds development was fairly smooth last month. Work on the third level is underway at a healthy pace and we’re in good spirits despite not meeting the goal we had for March.

For April we want to wrap up the design for the third boss fight, and have the whole level layout playable with the proper encounters. The bulk of the annoying groundwork was made sometime last year, so this is building on top of that milestone. This will likely leave some room to move on to chapter 4 in about two weeks if things go well.

Not gonna lie, I’m anxious over my goals for the summer, but I shouldn’t beat myself over that… I’m doing what I can over here

Looking at my screenshots and video folder — there’s a lot I could show you but it’s gonna spoil a lot. There’s cool new enemy types, environments that people might not be expecting from what they’ve seen of the game, and so on. I could draw something cool to adorn this post too, but like I said at the start I’m not doing my best.

Please accept this ominous Anna for the troubles.

Maybe I’ll install like a spoiler plugin so I can post work in progress shots from the latter chapters and have people opt in. I do want everyone to be surprised, so it won’t be anything polished even if properly obfuscated. Still, I’d like to hear your opinions on this. Let me know over on Discord.

I guess that would be it for now. Not a whole lot of exciting development other than a healthy pace towards content completion. We wanna finish all the big stuff before we get granular with things like cutscenes and lighting; The least time consuming aspect of this game in my experience.

One last thing: While I really, REALLY wanna finish this game sooner rather than later, it’s not because I’m fed up (it’s actually been really fun to work on!), but because it’s already been too long. I wanna make more stuff. I haven’t even had the time to do a cool short game like I usually do at this time of the year. It’s fucked up! In the Grace of our Malice is a year old and I didn’t even celebrate it proper. I love that game like you wouldn’t believe.

Anyway, see you all next month.