Another environment partially finished. Gonna replace a bunch of the placeholders at a later date but it’s looking really good already. I even hooked the BGM for good measure.

Had a call with newprogrammer and planned the next couple days since they’ll be rather important. In short, we’ll work towards a stable build to update over time. And to achieve this we’ll polish the game’s pacing and presentation; Think of fancier transitions, fully working menus, shops, locations, all that jazz. Even if the assets inside the game’s environments and characters aren’t final the build itself will aim at being as close as possible to what players will eventually experience.

Gonna be real fun to treat this build as a released game and update it over time.

The next couple days will be focused towards that goal and then we go back to battles and enemies.

Didn’t post for a whole week, I think?

Ludum Dare happened right after my last entry, then the rest of the following week I just made a bunch of environments and designs. Playtested the game too and it’s all looking very good. We gonna go ahead and polish the presentation (all UI stuff in place, fancy transitions, music, sound effects. All the enchilada) to have a stable build and… make the rest of the game I guess, lol.

Today I finished another couple environments, and did a draft of what I’d like the map to look like when choosing places to go. I made this to Parasite Eve’s soundtrack so the result was pretty baller. I like that the game has a solid enough identity now to the point I can just do these things real quick, plus knowing my way around Unity.

It’s not functional yet, this is just the usual set up I do so newprogrammer can provide the actual programming without having to ask me if it looks good : )

I was gonna have a call today with newprogrammer but fucking hell, I’m tired. Super tired. I’m using last bit of energy writing this.

This week’s gonna be fun!

After some more planning and light writing we’ve begun to play around with the currently finished chapter to make it align with the new design and loop. Can’t say it works for sure quite yet, for I haven’t playtested yet, but the iteration has been quick thanks to the tools.

I’m still getting used, honestly. Like, so much work suddenly disappeared that we don’t know what to do with so much freedom, which is where self-control and moderation must be applied. We’ll take all the time we saved taking these key decisions and invest them towards the combat, so that’s likely the aspect that will see the most tweaks in the future. After that we can decide what to add.

Meanwhile I can work at peace knowing how much I have to write for any given chapter. I was writing the game, as many people who check these logs know, as if it was a movie script. Then we adapt that into a playable level.

The problem is that writing this way makes it really hard to gauge how much dialogue is needed. Sure, I can write a whole chapter taking gameplay into account in the screenplay itself, but it eventually becomes very abstract and dialogue that works on paper comes out really cringey during gameplay.

What I’m doing now is taking the dialogue from those screenplays, then make an interactive flowchart using Twine. It allows me to visualize the game without prototyping and succesfully identify where writing is needed. This method wouldn’t work with our previous game loop (I’ll talk about that once the game ships).

This might sound like common sense to seasoned developers (thinking in flowcharts insead of traditional screenwriting), but this is the first time we make a game that has like full gameplay sections between the story, so a lot of this is new for everyone. Making games is hard, especially when 2D Visual Novels/narrative thingies are what I’m used to.

I’ve also been working on new UI elements and character design. Tomorrow I hope I can playtest stuff to start tweaking what needs to be tweaked, wrap up some much needed features and generally just make the game feel really good now that we don’t have to work on so much shit.

Most of the work was actually done last night while we were watching wrestling, and today was a continuation of it. We decided to lower the scope of the game so we can ship faster. Doesn’t mean a rewriting of anything; tools work just fine. What we’ll do is focus on combat way more, make normal enemies more about quality rather than quantity, tweak the gameplay loop so it’s actually a doable design and reduce the bulk of environment work by more than half.

The result will be a far more focused game. Still 6-7 chapters with the same story we already wrote, just designed differently to actually finish within this lifetime. And honestly we could just spend 2 more years realizing what we originally had in mind but fuck that noise. Let’s ship something better, sooner.

This week we’ll focus on prototyping this new design and if it goes well then we spear ahead with it. Good thing it’s a matter of moving existing nodes and chunks of gameplay around instead of starting from scratch, lol.

22: Work on environments. Playtesting threw interetsing results in that I probably need to go back to the drawing board to better connect events and change their place in the game’s flow. No rewrites or anything, just better positioning/pacing if that makes any sense. Gotta think in flowcharts instead of linear like a movie script.

23: More work on environments and some writing. Still stuck on what should be done. Might take a while.

24: Mostly environment and shader work. Stress-free comfy work as I’m apparently understanding level design at a deeper level.

Have a great weekend!

Did what I do when I have writer’s block: Environment stuff. Nothing I can show but had lots of fun regardless. Newprogrammer did a quick saving feature so I can debug things without going thru the game again but we have some issues where one of the dialogues will only trigger the last line. We have no idea why that happens only on my side (the suspect so far seems to be Unity collab but who knows).

Back to work after taking a week to heal from some ear issues. Already went to the doctor and everything’s good.

Spent most of the day writing but didn’t get very far. I’m having some serious writer’s block but at least we had an impromptu group playtesting thru stream to play the whole chapter, and things are looking good so far. Combat needs love, and pacing details need to be baked in the game’s flow to automate a bunch of the style choices. I hope I can continue writing tomorrow or at least come up with a better way of approaching this. An anti-writer’s block method? I wonder if sucha thing exists.

Knee deep in writing at the moment. Finished Chapter 5, started Chapter 6 which is the end of the story. Very excited and nervous, not gonna lie.

Tomorrow more writing while newprogrammer wraps up some extra tools.

Things are moving kinda fast!! very nice!!

Spent most of the day writing and that’s pretty much it. I did also draw a bunch in order to explain the map’s flow to newprogrammer so that was fun. He’s knee deep doing what needs to be done in order to make it work and that’s what he’ll probably do the rest of the week. My aim is to finish this script tomorrow and then start a new one pronto.

Things are pretty interesting!

Been a bit out of it with an ear infection but it’s getting better. Today I implemented sound again in the project (this a clean slate we began in like March or April, I forgot) and finally added footsteps, which were missing from the previous project iteration. People just don’t get how much that shit adds to the mood, lol.

For now there’s only one set of sounds for footsteps, later we’ll add bespoke ones for every type of material.

Newprogrammer has been debugging today and tomorrow the dungeon will get implemented into the episode’s flow. Got a bit behind on that one but should be good to go this week.

If there’s not a lot to do regarding that implementation on my side I’d like to write more. It’s pretty funny that I’ve been saying that for like weeks or some shit, but there’s always a pressing issue to take care of.