More boring progress since we are still setting up a buncha stuff in the migration to the blank project. There’s a few things i wanna do over such as the controls and start using rootmotion for movement but it’s tricky. There’s also new unity tech (new to me anyway) that i wasn’t aware of such as the new input system and animation rigging and so far the results are great! but i doubt i’ll be using animation rigging for gameplay. I think it’s better suited for cutscenes and dialogues cause tweeining works better for transformations mid gameplay.
Newprogrammer also refactored a number of scripts and now some UI stuff that was up to 500 lines of code are now 50 so that’s pretty cool.
tomorrow i’ll keep tweaking more animations and possibly resume writing the chapter i’ve been working on.
not a log for work per se but i do have a new video game to show! made with the usual sukeban crew, this is probably the most hostile title we’ve made for a game jam. I think it’s quite beefy for a title made in 3 days, but also has no intentions of being fun. Very unapologetic in its design but enough of the self jerking.
Started work on a new script and it’s going smooth so far. I believe I’ve found the sweet spot between words and gameplay which is why any future ones might be done a bit faster, and i’ll have to trim the one i did first quite a bit. Maybe I should move some events that happen there and feature them elsewhere since there’s A LOT of dialogue . It’s gonna be interesting to balance a few things i’ve found along the way, namely see which aspects are going to be trimmed, scrapped or changed to favor the other. It’s not like the script and the gameplay loop are fighting for supremacy; it’s that they work in a very intertwined way right now it’s fun to think about that dynamic. Writing and gameplay working together and making compromises. Kinda like a marriage.
Tomorrow is ludum dare, and as usual i’ll give my best to deliver a fun, experimental game even if i got no clue right now on what to do. I had like a million ideas and they all vanished overnight or were too ambitious.
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.
Chapter 4’s first draft is complete. Took less time due to having this one planned rather well and it having more gameplay meant writing less dialogue but it still came out pretty good. I need to develop some things i left hanging and do a consistency pass now that i’m finding out what the game is about (don’t ask).
Newprogrammer and I decided to migrate to another version of unity from a clean project since we basically lost control of what’s fucking up the game in mysterious ways, so we’ll be rewriting and carefully migrate scripts. Only the ones we use and are absolutely vital. Dunno how long this is gonna take but i’m not worried, since I have to write 4 other chapters. My goal is to complete the game’s story by the time the migration is complete and fully functional. I’ll be adding that to my daily tasks though, since I gotta migrate a bunch of things myself and set things up in a clearner way. I might do away with the ps1 stuff but i’m still undecided on that front. I want the game to look retro and pixel-y but certain things with the ps1 workflow is massively fucking me up (transitions break, the post processing is funky, and a plethora of etc.), and it’s making me think that kinda style doesn’t work for a large project but who knows, maybe we are that incompetent.
More writing work. I’m going surprisingly fast with this chapter, though this one does have less dialogue than the other one by virtue of having more gameplay bits. Pretty excited to see where it leads since i already had to change one ending because the characters evolved in a way i wasn’t expecting. Lovely stuff all around.
dunno if it’s a fluke but i woke up at semi-normal times (5 am or something like that) and worked just fine on the new script. It’s chapter 4 and since i already had it well-planned i’m going at a rather speedy pace and managed to write around 20 pages of it. I also sent the previous draft to a couple friends who are giving me some valuable-ass feedback so there’s that.
Newprogrammer is fixing some nasty bugs i found during testing but one remains mega obtuse to replicate. In essence, the player shoots and doesn’t hit the enemy even if the trayectory is clear, and then proceeds to shoot a couple more times to varying degrees of success even if there are no more attacks left in the queue.
Hopefully it shows up again next time i fire it up to find out what’s causing it.
went over the script and made some needed adjustments after the team gave me feedback. So far it’s been received VERY well, even though i’m still hella insecure about it cause it’s my first time working on something of this magnitude. It’s not that the game is huge, but rather that it has more moving parts compared to a vn with just people chatting. The comments so far have been very encouraging and gives me confidence to jump to the next script. While the one i finished is still in draft stage, I seldom make the tweaks in the scripts since i prefer to keep notes and then do it inside the game. This is so i don’t feel like i’ve been staring at the same text document for ages and get to see if the changes work right away.
for project X i finished the character design i wanted to work on and turned out really good. I wasn’t expecting the direction i took with it, but i’m also not complaining. At all! next step is to make it a sprite if the team loves her as much as me.
Since my schedule has been a bit all over the place i think i can keep working in bursts over the weekend. Let’s see how that goes.
alright, script for chapter 3 is done, fucking finally and i really like how it turned out. the team is going over the contents and i’ll get to fixing once they give me that delicious feedback. Only one more place is needed when it comes to modeling but that’s fine. Now i have to review a bunch of fixes newprogrammer did over the week that he posted in the trello board. Now if you guys excuse me i have some empanadas waiting for me, i’m hungry.
Lots of work done even if i’m not timely updating the blog. My sleep schedule is a mess and I forget to write when it’s really late.
script for chapter 3 is done, i just have to extend what i have of the ending and send it to the team for feedback. I’m aware of a bunch of flaws but it’s nothing i can’t fix, plus they always have a bunch of ideas in can incorporate for better effect. Faceset for a third character in project X is done and now i have to design the final main one and get to the thing i wanted to do last week with the backgrounds. Newprogrammer has been chipping away at bugs and also completed a couple features i asked, like the debug thingie. It’s my hope we can work on the game’s levels again really soon when i’m done with the words.
it’s crazy how much the last stretch of februrary and march sidetracked me completely. I went from sleeping really well to whatever the hell i’m doing now. I’m still not crunching and get a lotta work done everyday, but it doesn’t feel as consistent as when i was working a 9 to 5 program. I need to make adjustments pronto!
