so the process of reskinning the same base model actually works and it’s pretty fast depending on what i want to do, so that’s really cool! means i can just churn out basic enemies whenever we need a new one without much drama.

made some new ui elements for the menu, namely a cool-looking tooltip and we added some basic qol improvements. Once we code that tooltip the menu will be ready, maybe, you know how it goes.

the rest of the day i spent it playtesting, apparently newprogrammer fixed the battle stuff as i actually played half the level and it all worked fine, i just died because i’m kind of a dumbass and we still don’t have checkpoints. Got some new models from the 3d team and they all look great except for one of em that has funky textures, so delivering that feedback took time from the day too.

i wanna integrate the new enemy models this monday, along with finally deciding what to do with this map, it’s all falling apart bros…! at least in my head.

finished the model i was working on yesterday, which is kind of a miracle? it went so smoothly. I began with a drawing of i wanted it to look, then the geometry, texturing, rigging, and i didn’t run into any major issues except googling why blender wasn’t automatically assigning bone weight to the character’s head, turns out i was running into some scaling issues. Automatic weights worked on the first try too, so i didn’t have to tweak anything, kind of insane really.

the results are pretty cool and i can see a massive improvement in the way i do textures.

Most of my day went into finishing this dude, tomorrow i should grab this base model and do another similar enemy but with different hair, textures and accesories. IN THEORY this should lead to rapid enemy humanoids, but i’ll find out in due time.

tested newprogrammer’s commits and found that battles still have issues to finish, and i’m wondering if we should rethink how that flow is made cause it’s been a torn for a while now. He says it’s not that big of a deal because unity does in fact show what’s wrong. Menu is also abit raw but almost there, just needs some extra polishing for human usage, such as tooltips and highlight active tabs.

After a rather long holiday (felt forever for me, dunno why as it wasn’t even bad), i’m back to action and ohhh boy, do i have a bad feeling of the good kind…

What i mean to say is that i’m not very happy with the current level design and i’m thinking really hard of tossing everything again and begin from scratch using the knowledge i gained around the end of the year. Note that this kind of environments aren’t that hard to map in ps1 fidelity, and the props, systems and set pieces are already made, it’s just that this map doesn’t make any fucking sense and i’m basically going insane. I’m now looking at this more as a sandbox level for testing rather than a finished one.

That said, I’m not gonna waste time redoing stuff right now as we need to keep spearing ahead, THEN if there’s time, i’ll change it, so no worries about reading more blogs about me being in a constant state of “almost done with this map”

Aside from these musings i began the day doing the interface for a piece of side content we’ll properly code later when we finish more pressing matters, and spent the rest of the day doing concept art and blocking the topology for a model i’ll be using as a sort of humanoid template for generic enemies. The plan is making enough parts and unwrap the model in such a way that i just have to change textures, hair and weapons to have completely different dudes to kill or go non lethal on their asses, without spending a fuckload of money outsourcing or precious time grinding.

There are some things that need some serious planning to avoid bloating the shit out of the project, putting that here as a reminder. Namely how long we want it to be and the structure of the main story so we can establish once and for all how levels will load, what menus will be used for for chapter selection… it’s a lotta stuff i didn’t consider early on, but better late than never. Right now my mind is set on a structure similar to that of Killer7 where you chose a target and the chapter begins, but it’s currently at odds with some stuff we wanna include.

Frankly speaking, i’m a bit scared! but it’s nothing i can’t solve.

so this is technically my last work day of the year, i’ll still be on the lookout for general company stuff but from tomorrow it’s vacation time. I want to do like a longer post looking back at the past 12 months of non stop hustle to get this project going, but that’s gonna be once i have my ideas sorted out. I can safely say right now that it was all pretty good, lots of learning, getting the feel that we could have been here way earlier had we known what we were doing but hey, you learn by actually doing shit, not endlessly planning… you plan when you know your shit, it’s called pre-production and pros know about that.

but anyway, it was all good stuff, save for health scares and constant despair due to being still rather new to 3d development what we did here is nothing short of fantastic, and i look forward to 2021 since it’s gonna be the year where we focus solely on game content, now that our tool chain and features are locked in.

today i wanted to test the whole level but i rather leave this to january kiririn fifty one cause it’s gonna be worse if we stop working knowing the whole thing can’t be completed (with the temptation to keep working), so it’s better to just wrap up our current tasks and get some rest. What I did do however is model and texture a couple new props and link the new pieces of environments to the rest of the map and with the boss cutscenes, which all work properly save for one of the movies that was acting up god knows why. I hope this isn’t going to be a thing moving forward, cause i’m banking on timeline for a lot of shit.

newprogrammer finished the new character menu using a separate scene i made for all of it, and save for some funny bugs it looks and works great.

but yeah, good stuff, i’ll make sure to write down the wave of ideas i will come up with when i’m away from this.

Wasted the entire day troubleshooting unity shit that made the project completely unplayable and the version control didn’t want to do its hecking job, which drove me to the wall in anger. Fixed it by having newprogrammer send me a .zip with the whole project and then downloading my last commit.

it was some shit with bakery being unstable all over the place, likely because i updated my nvidia drivers without updating bakery itself, but anyway it’s solved.

I hope tomorrow i get to at least test the whole level with the character menu, cause it’s gonna be the last work day for the year.

so one more day of work before vacations and i can say that we did achieve our goals, though a bit less than i’d hoped. Still, we did a fuckton and i’m proud.

Another thing I’m proud of is my environment work.

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I’m really happy with how things are turning out and can’t wait to do more of these as we build the game.

newprogrammer said he was probably gonna work a half day tomorrow to wrap up the character menu so we just playtest this monday and call it there. Spearking of playtesting, i discovered a pair of happenings, like the boss attacking but not moving and battles not finishing (old issue that resurfaced with the new battle ui) but they don’t seem like big problems to worry about… all in due time.

See you all monday.

Newprogrammer is almost done with the new character menu and i worked all day on polishing the general look of the level and making it more cohesive, also a few new props. Been having some problems with bakery where at a certain amount of objects it just refuses to do its thing which is kinda worrying, might need to segment this into several scenes? need to look into it.

made a complete new cutscene sans a few missing assets i need to add later. It’s a pretty fucking good one honestly, despite its simplicity i’m very much vibing with how it turned out and can’t wait for people to play this. It took me a while mostly on the writing department of which i wanted to talk about a bit.

So, I’m not a writer, not a real one, i say this because the only way i can possibly come up with good writing is by doing everything on the spot. My process with this game is the following:

• i make a skeleton of things and beats i’d like to see, both gameplay and story/characters
• start some groundwork on the cutscene (set, cameras, characters, animations needed)
• THEN i write the actual dialogue, and depending on the dialogue i add more visuals that help what i’m trying to convey

the downside is that i can’t just work following a plan, the good part is that it’s all super fun and dynamic to do. The skeleton i talked about takes care of consistency and structure, the rest is very much free form.

Will it work? who knows, but i’m liking the results a lot.

tomorrow i’ll likely keep grinding cutscenes, while new programmer finishes the new character menu work, since he’s mostly done with the new battle ui integration.

gonna keep this one short cause i have a huge headache.

newprogrammer finished the interface revamp and is now fixing some bugs that arised from those changes, should be all good by tomorrow. On my end i’m done with the rough cut of the cutscene i was making yesterday and ran into a couple issues regarding animation clips and timeline where certain things will look different in preview and during playmode, which has me all kinds of worried… what if they also work differently when you build the game? scary shit.

anyway, time to get some rest.

my nephew is 16 years old, holy fucking shit.

wasted a bit of my morning not being able to play because the game broke again (expected, we are changing core systems), and unity decided to stop working too (the collab feature didn’t want to work), then after lunch i focused 100% on a important story cutscene, from writing to actually making it look nice inside the game. I’ve been getting increasingly effective at making these, but some problems still arised, such as not being able to change lookAt in cinemachine through the animation track (it was working before, not anymore), and a really specific animation clip completely breaking while the game is in slow motion, which is going to be super annoying to delve into and try to fix.

Tomorrow i’ll keep working on it, since this is the first big story movie of the game and needs lots of attention. Should get at least a rough cut of it, then start writing another.