Began the day working on particle effects and their timing during attacks. Actually a pending task from last week but I didn’t do crap on Friday.

I like it.

Here’s a snippet of how the combat looks at the moment after newprogrammer implemented my crude vfx.

This is a test room where we have fun fighting permutations of enemy groups. The idea is to go for quality vs quantity and design each enemy as unique as humanly possible so every encounter has a different strategy even if you’ve faced the same foes in other occasions. Lots of focus is going towards readability as well.

You guys know I love Parasite Eve and gameplay-wise is pretty much the template, but something that always bugged me about it was that some foes were really hard to read; both because the animation work was on the rougher side with almost no anticipation and battles being generaly static due to the limitations of pre-rendered environments. Here we did our best to avoid those sorts of trappings and I think we’re on the right path.

Still lots to adjust but we’re near a level of polish that makes me very comfortable. Next is player skills once we iron out a bunch of things that bother me. Chief among them is the weird timing for the melee attack visual effect; It happens before the model does the animation.

Dude with the sword thingie also has the habit of hitting me instantly after shooting them, as if it was resuming an a canceled attack but the damage was received well after the animation ended so that’s gotta be adjusted.

With this more or less done on my end I’ll focus on the story sequences again and see if I can polish most (if not all) of them by the end of the week.

Polished a couple story sequences, added extra sounds and adjusted some particle effects so they can be easily telegraphed by the player. Playtested a bunch and stuff is looking really good after newprogrammer quickly changed the awkward behaviors I was looking at.

The enemy I was talking about yesterday was fully implemented very quick and just gotta adjust some legibility issues with melee attacks. Might have to tweak some of the animations at a later date too.

With this mostly done we wanna focus on implementing more skills for the players to use. So far enemies have a lot of ways to kill you but players at the moment are only limited to using fire arms. Can’t wait to get to that.

More work on enemy types. Me and newprogrammer have been focused on pretty much just that and we are almost done with a really cool range-focused foe. One of the attacks remind me of the early days of this log when we were doing the first batch of prototype enemies. The gif was an area of damage of sorts (sorry, I really don’t know the usual naming conventions for these. I just do em’). I’d go back and look for it but I realized I suck at properly tagging and archiving these. It’s probably on my laptop but I’m not getting up until I write this (I’d get distracted and forget).

Tbh a lot of this is me creating Frankenstein monsters with existing particle from Unity and tweaking animation packs with UMotion Pro. It’s nice enough to quickly do stuff that also looks sorta good… just in case we gotta ship and run outta time. Good looking placeholders = shipped game. Worked with Valhalla! (I will never tell what was a placeholder and remained inside the game).

This is one of the models I was talking about by the way. Just the more outstanding shapes and colors! That way I can polish them at a later date while making sure they fit the game screen and are readable.

Might take friday off if my neck is still stiff. It was good for most of the day but I never know how i’m gonna wake up tomorrow.

Lotsa work on the battle system. We gave the thing sound, brought back some camera effects that were missing from this iteration, adjusted some animations and changed around a couple UI elements and flair. Fixed bugs too… Stuff’s looking great.

Coming days will be all about implementing new enemy models/types, juice things up wherever we can, and generally just making this as fun as possible while I go over the chapter and implement the scenarios already written.

It really does feel like this is a real game that might launch soon. Just gotta do our best and make these encounters truly great.

Here’s a funny bug from earlier today. Letters will get scrambled after changing targets rapidly. Hair looks funny too cause the physics take time scale into account. Need to disable that later.

Last week ended on a bit of a downer emotionally speaking so I took some extra time to rest. The player’s computer is done and I’ve been modeling new enemies from a concept art I drew a few weeks ago. What I did here was to complete the basic shapes and colors, rig, then throw inside the game for adjustment. This helps when designing behaviors and tweak general battle “readability”.

Newprogrammer was working on a new timeline tool but we had to scrap it and replace it with something simpler and easier to maintain – much to his chagrin.

Made some further adjustments to the template scene we use for all battles and its camera behaviors so we can bring back some juice we had in the previous version. Tomorrow we begin a long road towards having great combat, and hopefully I get familiar enough with the story tools so I can tweak all of that in the meantime.

More environment and design work. Drew a couple characters between yesterday and today which I have to model, plus I gotta model some enemies pretty soon (already designed!). Also some mild UI work (lil thingies for notifications and prompts).

Newprogrammer is almost done with the BBS feature, tomorrow he will tackle the news sites.

Current plan is to work on some enemy models before he’s done with the computer features and the timeline tool. Not sure if I have to texture them but I do need like the basic shape going on so I know the thing is actually readable during battle. Perhaps instead of texture I’ll leave it with like, solid colors.

Not sure how many enemy types we’ll need. Thankfully we do need less of them with the new design, but that’s still gonna take some heavy work.

That’s it for today.

Sorry for not being able to do this daily as of late. When I go to bed after 10pm I tend to just go sleep and forget everything.

Still doing lots of work polishing with the main game flow. The UI is almost there and we just wrapped up a notification system, next is the player’s computer.

It’s gonna be something similar to Jill’s tablet in va11halla. Took me longer than expected to find an aesthetic I feel happy with. Worked on some environments too, but the ones needed for this particular segment of the game are ready to go.

The game does feel very much real now! aside from jank battles everything else looks and feels as it should.

While we polish battles at a later day I’ll go over the story sequences and see what can be improved and whatnot. Like I mentioned before this rework didn’t need a rewrite (thank god) but it does need less words, so I gotta adapt what we have.

That’s way later though. For now we’ll work on that PC, then an extra tool for timeline. Once that’s good THEN we polish battles.

Lots of work coming but now that everything is set in stone after so long we can move with a rocket strapped to our backs to the finish line. Let’s fucking go!

I completely forgot to update the log but it’s been due to really good work being done so far.

All the past several days have been spent on environment work, polishing the ui, giving it sound, making fancier transitions, integrating the overworld map, polishing cutscenes… it’s a lot of shit! of the good kind, that is.

Our goal at the moment is to make everything that’s already tested as pretty as possible, then newprogrammer goes back to the combat while I work on the story beats. I don’t wanna get ahead of myself but I have a mental estimate on how much time it’s gonna take to complete the whole game. Won’t reveal it, but boy is that encouraging. Game feels more real than ever.

It helps that the current scope is not aiming for a particularly long title. Replayable perhaps, but at our current size we can’t aim at a huge sprawling-ass action rpg. Expect a very nice story.

Here’s a funny shot from one of the cutscenes. I wonder how much this one will change between now and release.

Spent the past days working on a rather large environment and it came out pretty good. Actually quite proud of it!

It’s not done yet, but the mood is there.

Here’s a before and after:

The blocking was done months ago so it was very much just polishing. I need to go back to other finished maps at a later date cause I’ve been improving a lot and the disparity is starting to show.

Not gonna get carried away though. The game needs to ship.

Newprogrammer is hooking some UI stuff since I made the character menu again, except this time it’s actually just text and pictures, no fancy 3d previews or anything. Polishing it was gonna take too much time from us so it had to be simplified. After that he’s gonna integrate the map screen. All in all the goal is to have the game to look and feel as close as the final version as possible and build from there now that the design has been figured out.

It’s taken way, way longer than everyone expected but there were a lot of growing pains we didn’t account for. Stuff is finally coming on its own and I can’t wait to show it in full.