almost done with the script, if everything goes well the first draft will be ready tomorrow since i only have to extend a few scenes and write the ending. been a longer journey than expected… as you guys know my mood for work hasn’t been the best, but i’m determined to push forward at a pace where i can do it safely until i can go full gear again. I’m really excited with how things are turning out. Slow but steady wins the race.
Author: kiririn51
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march 30 and 31
Went back to writing and things are going very well, i was able to go back to some of the earlier bits and change around some parts that didn’t make much sense anymore or were redundant, but it’s gonna be an interesting experiment to see how much of this is gonna make it into the game since i’m looking at a lot of dialogue, and if possible i would like a ratio of gameplay to story to skew in favor of gameplay. What I want to say is that once i start putting this one together i’ll have a better idea of how much dialogue i need to write for future chapters.
newprogrammer is feeling better after new medication and a couple visits to the doctor and he’s been fixing more bugs with enemy behaviors that i need to playtest tomorrow. A couple tasks arose, such as a scene selection menu inside the game to better debug scenarios and a cleaner, more generic character controller without battle logic for downtimes. Maybe this could lead to a clean overall exploration (code-wise).
Gonna keep writing and then start new portraits for project X. I’m close to having all characters done so i can focus on backgrounds and cg’s.
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march 26
couldn’t do much yesterday due to irl stuff, but today i did manage to finish most portraits for a character in project X, next is some more ui stuff and jump to the third character, hopefully i can do that one faster. I’ve also been playtesting more project D stuff, but newprogrammer is gonna take a small break since he’s got his own health issues now. Nothing big, but he could use some big energy, dragon ball style. Good news is that the problems i found with the enemy creator have been fixed and at this point i really should finish the script for chapter 3 cause that’s getting silly, lol.
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march 23 and 24
big progress done with the enemy tools, they are now a breeze to make after some extensive test and quite a disaster that happened when i made a new one and the previous one went berserk…. because i accidentally moved the model far from the prefab center, and i had no idea until after newprogrammer had to figure out why it was freaking out. Sorry!!
so work has been mostly playtesting and stress the tools as much as i can, plus work on the secret project not related to games that’s almost there, just gotta test the final bits and then go ham with the rest. I feel a lot of people will appreciate this move and i’m very excited about it.
tomorrow i should finish the work on the portraits i was working on in project x, as well as resume writing what’s left of chapter 3 since i’ve been neglecting it.
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march 22
Had to take a week to regroup and get the spark back. Doesn’t mean i didn’t do crap, but i did limit the amount of things that required mental bandwidth. For example, I wrote at an extra slow pace and playtested whatever newprogrammer and the project X added to new builds. Speaking of newprogrammer, he’s finally kind of done with enemy tools and we are just fine tuning details of how they look in battle. Today i did mostly UI stuff for both projects, playtested and got involved in some boring-yet-time-consuming company stuff… but it’s long overdue stuff! stuff you will like! trust me, it’s gonna be cool.
Anyway, gonna fully pick up the pace tomorrow hopefully now that i’m also sleeping early-ish once again. Remember, rest is important and if you’re not feeling it take time for yourself and commit to actually come back.
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march 10 and 12
No report from yesterday since i did jackshit. Well, at least related to current projects. Thing is, i’m going through that phase of mine where I wanna do something to release some ideas that have been simmering for a long time and can’t include in on-going work, so naturally i become rather unmotivated and get hella sidetracked. It’s really bad for you guys since a lost day of work is an extra day of waiting (for whoever’s left out there that’s hyped for our stuff), but good for my wellbeing since it gets my creative juice flowing and makes me learn things that i can apply to the big meal. I mentioned before i might take a couple weeks to indulge myself into a completely alien thing and i have no idea when that might be, just know that it’s close. Plus ludum dare is in like two months i think, that’s another chance to do new stuff.
anyway, on the 10th all i did was write and i’m getting closer and closer to the finish line. I was intending to finish everything today but like i mentioned i got mega sidetracked. I write like one or two scenes per day, but now i gotta go back and tweak for some inconsistencies, better foreshadow cool stuff, and retroactively change some things due to shit i made up along the way. The results so far have been really good despite me being really slow at it, but as long as i do a hefty chunk everyday it’s gonna be alright. Today I mostly helped newprogrammer to plan out the behavior of the enemies by tweaking animator controllers and give him a rough approximation of how they should fight in battle, with properly blended animations and all that. It’s a rather simple job but at the same time quite time consuming since i have to make sure it’s all readable and looks good in motion. We also brainstormed a lot to fix the aforementioned inconsistency issues and came to some really good conclusions that i’ll be writing down once i go back to work.
Not gonna lie it’s been a rough two weeks now, motivation has a sinusoid shape going up and down, up and down in really annoying fashion. I shouldn’t stress too much but you gotta be in my shoes here. It’s been almost half a decade since va11halla was released, and I hate that because of situations out of my control we had to delay the game we planned to launch in 2020. I’ve always wanted to release a commercial game every 2 or 3 years, have many cool new IP by the time we turned 10 to keep a healthy momentum, now I’m all worried there won’t be anyone there for us when we release all we have in the oven. It might be a silly thought, but it kinda eats me alive everyday. No option but to chin up and keep working even if there’s nobody waiting for us; surely they’ll come back once they hear sukeban games made a badass game once again.
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march 8 and 9
didn’t do much on monday aside from helping newprogrammer to test the enemy maker tool (needs a lot of polish but we getting there) and brainstorm about the story. Today I focused mostly on the writing and finished another scene leading to a big gameplay segment. There’s an unexpected amount of text now and i think our dialogue system won’t be up to the task, and i’ll have to think in ways to make it better.
If everything goes well i should be done with chapter 3 this friday, then monday we do our best to finish pending technical tasks that keep arising whenever i’m sure it’s just gonna be content generation, so i won’t say that anymore and just keep working.
In other news, june released a song they made a while ago for n1rvanna, it’s one of my favorites so go check it out!
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march 4 and 5
Even more writing! It’s all been quite fun, crafting dialogue while working chill without pressure is honestly quite comfy and could get used to this. I’m little over half the entire script for this chapter and the team seems to like it a lot, which makes me very happy.
Newprogrammer pointed out a few weird things regarding the timeline of events, and I’m really glad he caught on those since I feel my strong suit is character dialogue, not details of the world outside the room in which these people interact with each other, must improve that side.
For project X I made a cool face set to turn into pixel art later but works as a placeholder. Sophie told me that way she can get a better grasp on how the character speaks and I found that really cool. Might get a bit crazy with the angles of those facesets once i get into the meat and potatoes of the final versions.
It’s all coming along very well even if slow. Well, it seems slow to me, maybe I’m actually doing it at a really good pace… Guess I’ll find out in due time.
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March 3
Gonna do this real quick since I’m writing from my phone.Project D: more writing, already reached some of the more gameplay heavy parts and they are indeed in less need for words, so this second half shouldn’t take as much. I’m sensing a lot will change but that’s the nature of a first draft.Project X: did some concept art and not much else aside from exploring different ways to transmit a retro feel with some modern sensibilities, fun stuff.Pretty light day, new programmer moved places so he’s busy until Friday, tho he’s still polishing the enemy tools while he’s offline anyway. I’ll check it whenever he’s back online.
Also lol i wrote this to the main sukeban blog by accident (fucking phoneposting), surely nobody aggregated that website to any rss feed…
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march 2
More writing work. I feel like I’m going slow but at the same time at an acceptable rate? I really don’t wanna rush my dialogue, but I wanna write MORE per day. It’s important to keep myself clear minded and just make everything flow, so as long as I do a good chunk everytday it’s gonna be alright. Moreover, I’m already halfway through with three more playable areas to write for, and I’m guessing they won’t be as word-heavy as the first half that needs to set up a bunch of things. I’ll find out once I get there.
In other news, I might take a week at some point this month to make a complete game and release some pent up creative feelies and learn some stuff I’ve been curious about. It’s only an idea for now, might just wait for Ludum Dare but I’m not sure if what I have in mind can be done in 3 days.