Sukeban Games

Developer Diaries from the Sukeban Staff (mainly just kiri)

Author: kiririn51

  • August 16

    Blocked out another scene. It’s a small one (like pretty much all scenes in this chapter) but it did force me to get creative with the way it’s done. It’s just two rooms and two hallways which I’ve done before plenty, but this time around it does feel like a real place. Hard to describe but I guess that’s the experience I’ve accumulated since development began showing thru.

    Newprogrammer is polishing all kinds of things and implementing more dialogue. It looks as if it was taking a long time to do so, but he’s also fixing and building new code as he goes along depending on our needs so it’s fine. I’m very curious about how fast the other chapters can be made after this is all said an done.

    Tomorrow I’ll work on some menus and a simple first person camera for a cool segment. If there’s time I’d like to write a bit.

  • August 12

    Finished the set up for the boss character in this chapter and it took me longer than expected since I had a bit of trouble with her HUGE fuckin’ hair and the physics involved. The solution was easy, but I wasted time tryna doing it in Blender and ruining the heat maps of the model set up by the people who made it.

    The problem was that the back of the hair was parented to the head, and i needed it parented to the spine. I blender this can be done easily, but the bone mapping or whatever that’s called gets messed up in the .fbx export process. The solution was really dumb but lovely. Basically just drag the bone in the unity hierarchy to the bone you want as a parent. That’s it. It worked like a charm.

    I won’t show the results because I love her design and I rather show it in some trailer or something.

    Newprogrammer implemented more dialogue and made a list of recurrent issues that gotta be ironed out in the tool.

  • August 11

    Not a whole lot due to some personal thingies but still did the layout and set up for another scene and cleaned up the title screen. Newprogrammer had a couple buttons for New Game and Load Game in the most “programmer art” fashion you can think, so I drew a quick sketch and made the buttons consistent with the rest of the game.

    The game’s logo goes in the middle, but since it’s not final and contains an also not-final title for the project I won’t show it until a formal reveal.

    During the set up of the level I did encounter an unexpected problem.

    It looks as if the model gets off-center over time, which is weird since it doesn’t occur with Reila’s model. We’ll have to check this out once the dialogue gets implemented in this scene.

    Not sure if I’ll be able to make more levels tomorrow but we’ll see. I may have to redo the character menu since we are scrapping a bunch of features since there’s like, zero fuckin’ desire to do game balance. So a simplified gameplay is in order. Core stays the same, but we’ll proooobably not go with a skill tree. Perhaps a more DMC-esque upgrade shop?

    Again, we’ll see!

  • August 10

    Another two maps blocked out, and newprogrammer implemented some more dialogue. This time with cutscenes in between loading so that’s one less worry about the game’s flow. Things are really super fucking comfy right now and I couldn’t be happier. We’ll keep building this chapter and fix whatever comes up and I’ll keep polishing the visuals as we go.

    Tomorrow more of the same. Newprogrammer I think has to build a tool for creating NPCs but I don’t remember if that’s already done.

    Good shit!

  • august 9

    Newprogrammer has been implementing dialogue while I make levels. Today I blocked out 2, complete with camera set ups and all. Tomorrow I will probably do the same if I don’t feel like writing. Pretty chill yet productive day. Tons of fun playing around with cinemachine.

    Gonna be cool once players see a finished version of this.

  • august 6

    We began working on Project D chapter 4, stuff’s going surprisingly well. Newprogrammer listed an amusing 27 things to add but it’s all very needed stuff we’ll use a lot across every chapter. Chief among them is a way to trigger cutscenes when going from one place to another. That shit happens a lot!

    Felt nice to be back to making cutscenes, too. I also did some environment work. Gonna be an interesting next week for sure.

  • august 5

    More work on the big map. Getting closer on getting that “finished” version and it’s pretty fun to explore. Gonna take a while to polish but the important bits are almost done. Tomorrow I’ll likely continue that or start building chapter 4 if newprogrammer fixed some stuff that came up today.

  • august 4

    I wanted to write today but I remembered I also had a huge-ass map to “finish” – longtime readers know that “finish” means the whole enchilada with the layout, look and feel but still extremely rough, still easy to change as needed. So I’ll focus on that for the next couple days. That thing has been the bane of my existence so it’s gonna feel good once I have it working.

  • August 3

    Wrote another n1rvanna customer and that’s pretty much it. I’m using a really cool software that lets me know the runtime of any given scene and I’ve been writing 15 to 20 minutes worth of content everyday. I’m not trying to fill a quota, but it’s a good way to measure the amount of work done. Very important if I wanna keep myself motivated.

    Newprogrammer fixed a series of bugs related to the save system.

    Tomorrow I will either continue with another patron or finish Project D’s fifth chapter, for which I have a healthy amount of notes to fix the dumb thing I mentioned yesterday.

  • July 26 to August 2

    Today was a day of writing. I’m a bit stuck in some places as it seems like I wrote myself into a corner over something really stupid, so I’m considering changing a couple things. Time will tell if they are big things.

    Last week I spent a couple days just working on environments and level layouts, the the rest was spent doing a second draft for chapter 4 of Project D and writing what’s left of chapter 5. I finished chapter 4’s second draft in roughly two days and it came out pretty good. We’ll start putting that one together this week inside the game providing newprogrammer feels better health-wise.

    With that second revision and chapter 5 well on its way towards completion, I feel like Project D is about to complete a big milestone. We set out to do six chapters and so far we have 1, 3, 4 and soon 5. It’s possible we cram an extra one in there but it depends on the resources and writing needs. It could also all get compressed into a single stand alone story if it’s too big to make in what’s left of our self-imposed deadline. Gonna be interesting to see what actually makes it, but I’m fine if a lot ends up not being used since the experience is very much priceless and ideas are never truly lost.

    This week the most important tasks are:

    • Finishing chapter 5
    • Start putting together chapter 4 inside the engine
    • Write more n1rvanna customers (literally finished one today so it’s looking good)

    At one point I’ll have to start scheduling a bunch of these and go all gas no brakes, but until then I’ll keep working like I’ve been doing so far. Just taking my time to get a feel for every task, get stuff done one by one, etc.

    Sometimes it feels as if no progress is being made but that’s natural even when I’m busting my ass on these projects. Just gotta hang in there some more before it can get speedy again.