woke up a bit late today since i couldn’t sleep at all, something’s got me uneasy and it was really hard to relax and close my eyes.

Spent most of my hours working on the environments from the list while newprogrammer does the remaining features we thought were complete, overall just grinding stuff that’s already planned. Speaking of planning, been having some issues working on a morgue scene for i can’t find good reference on what a morgue needs in term of equipment, and i have no desire to visit a real one anytime soon to find out; it’s been tricky to research. On the bright side I finally started seeing the point of sketching stuff before modeling and texturing, it’s saving a lot of time since any iteration i make doesn’t involve doing the whole thing again. It’s what i’ve been saying all this time, planning is for people who already know the kinda work it entails to do X or Y task, now that i know the ins and outs of 3D modeling i can finally take my time to plan ahead.

Tomorrow i’ll likely start modeling the scene, providing i come up with a good layout on paper.

Goood shit, began the week with high energies even if i have some uhh, personal worries. Last friday we made a list of everything we’ll need for File 03, and part of it were a number of environments that i have to make, 8 of them to be exact and almost half of them are recurrent places, like Reila’s house, the HQ (doing these again since a lot changed since), a morgue, shady alleways, bars, etc. some of them are unique, like one or two but if we finish the bonus mode then all environments will be reusable! gotta squeeze everything for what it’s worth.

But anyway, out of the 8 environments, I’ve already drafted and prototyped 2 in a pretty refreshing fashion since i actually drew what they were going to look like and then did my thing with blender and pro builder. The results look pretty natural (as expected from all the studies I’ve done when it comes to environments) and they shouldn’t take long. The ps1esque limitations are in place so i can go ham with scenes without going crazy. I want dense places to explore and this is the only way i can make all props and whatnot in quick fashion.

Tomorrow i’ll keep blocking out the rest just so we can move ahead to content, and will texture in parallel to that, just need to organize myself a bit better. Pretty fun day! These places are not huge spoilers so expect some before/after shots once i’m happy with the results.

Not a lot of work yesterday since i had to attend some private matters and what little i did amounted to writing down some minor ideas and some sketches for one character that needs a redesign.

Today was a bit more busy, we just finalized the chapter scenario, from here on we gonna call it File 03; that’s right, we are gonna start by the third one so we can make the last and first chapters by the end of the schedule and use the learned experience for a good start and a good end. Anyway, file 03’s scenario is mostly done (we only need to clear up some of the dialogue that happens in the ending bits), made the list of locations, props, characters and other things i will need to make and outsource, it’s a fairly long chapter but despite that the amount of work is not that huge. We’ll begin this monday and then work on the rest of the scenarios in parallel. I recently finished the one for File 02, and currently in the middle of File 05. Right now we are planning for roughly 8 chapters of variable length. It’s a big game, but still with a considerable set of constraints to make it all viable.

Monday we’ll also need to wrap up some of the basic features we’ll need from now on, namely checkpoints, saves, skill tree, augments menu (more like uncomment that feature, lol), asyncronic loading (for levels that have more than one scene), and multi scene editing.

Shit got real fellas!

Here’s a Reila sketch I made last night cause i couldn’t sleep.

my hands hurt from typing, both in a document and on telegram just going back and forth with newprogrammer over the game’s details. I had to write a bunch of shit that was in our heads so our actual writer can go over it and then help with the rest of the outlines. The chapter we were planning last week got an overhaul and is almost done as a result, hopefully tomorrow it will be ready to go. Also drew a bunch of concept art for enemies in the current plan.

It’s all shit that’s supposed to be done in pre production but as i’ve said before, you gotta learn how to do the shit first before you can plan anything, otherwise you end up with a fat fucking document with an unfeasible scope.

The grind continues tomorrow, can’t wait to go back to environments and just putting the game together, but it’s gotta wait a bit more.

another day reviewing a script that’s getting dangerously chonk, very thick. Once we give it a polish pass we’ll determine if it needs to be condensed but for now we have to detail it quite a bit. We are almost there though, made big progress the past 2 days.

On the remaining menus, i’m mostly done with what i set out to do and just needs to be coded now but that will be done once we go back to the nitty gritty of work inside the engine.

Here’s hoping next week we’ll finalize planning. Probably not the case but it’d be cool if stage planning would take 1 or 2 weeks, then the levels another 2 weeks. Right now newprogrammer is doing a big chunk of the current level, so i’ll do the others in tandem just so we have a base by the time we move on to those.

yesterday was one shit of a day, i don’t wanna talk about that.

so, third day of writing and made some more progress, also began doing some extra menus that were missing and came up again in the plans, and it was pretty fun, i even had to do some illustration which i do not get to do a lot of these days, especially not for UI stuff. Tomorrow i’ll finish another menu which will likely involve more drawings so it can look amazing, and hopefully review a final plan for the chapter’s story content and progression. I need to be patient whenever we hit a similar planning phase, i hate planning because my brain feels i’m not doing much but it’s a necessary evil. At least the fact we are planning means we got experienced enough to have a good idea of the amount of work required to execute what’s on paper. Maybe i’ll enjoy planning now because of that!

second day of writing the script, mostly working on the rough of each event, how they connect and how they play. Games of this kind i’ve found work a lot like I think a movie works, except you have to account for a bunch of interactive variables and taking a hard look at everything to see which parts work better as a game and as a cutscene. It’s fun all around, but i’d be lying if i said i wasn’t mostly looking at the ceiling and generally dicking around while i was thinking of each event and piece of dialogue. I even began reading some interesting books that got a bunch of ideas flowing, but not in the direction i was expecting (a lot of what i came up with ended up being added to the background lore instead of you know, the blocking of each scene and sequence of the chapter in question)

It’s been a bit hard convincing myself that this is actual work compared to the shit i have to work on everyday inside the engine, but that’s also part of the learning process i suppose. Not everything has to be eternal suffering, sometimes work IS a bunch of passive brainstorming and typing shit in a word processor.

And to those wondering why we working on the script a year into the game’s development, remember that this time we are making a game first, one that was born out of ideas and an aesthetic vision, themes. We began with the game parts, made them look good, scrapped a bunch of things, polished others, now we have to make them have sense. We THOUGHT they were making sense as we were finishing this map, but after going through it at the start of the year i’ve realized just how much was being made as we went, not in a cool va11halla way where that kinda stuff is what makes the script so fun (in narrative games like that, i feel improvisation is key), but rather in a “oh fuck we made a bunch of cool shit but nothing makes sense when put together”

it’s frankly a tad difficult to explain, but hey, we are still amateurs at this, especially in 3d and pretty much everything we are doing here, for the next game we’ll be seasoned veterans and hopefully stuff will get made faster.

not a whole lotta hard progress since we spent most of the day playtesting and discussing/planning our next steps. We are in the best possible spot right now where our tools work just fine and the level design process has been ironed out, we just don’t have a whole lot of direction outside of the rough drafts that gave birth to this world and project, and it’s about time we began detailing these. Newprogammer and I will be in the process of mostly writing for the next couple days and then we’ll finish what’s left of the progression system. Really exciting stuff, even if it doesn’t make for the most interesting of log entries.