more enemy grinding, this time two extra models i spent most of my day both modeling and texturing. these are going to be sent to be rigged and animated next week probably. Other than that I didn’t do much, it’s what happens when i do mostly artistic things and basically why i’ve been avoiding them as of late, since all it involves is… well, just working on one thing for an extended amount of time, which also doesn’t sound impressive for this devlog either. Next on the list is complete one more enemy type, and then integrate them once we get the animations, though there’s a big chance it won’t make the cut before going on vacations. We’ll see!

newprogrammer is still on the refactoring of the interface stuff and it looks promising so far. With this we avoided somewhat of a bad habit of ours, where we basically stop development whenever we have to revamp something, and never occured to us that we can in fact revamp systems and shit, but on the side without disturbing the actual game design; basically us the neardenthals would make the game unplayable for days, even weeks instead of making the improvements on parallel to what’s already there. So yeh, learning experiences…

as my vacactions approach all i’m thinking now is what kinda thing i’ll prototype over the holidays. I feel like experimenting like i did last year with photogrammetry environments.

i’m feeling alright health-wise, but i can feel my brain about to explode with the amount of shit i have to do, so i’m just doing my thing as always without worrying about the numbers and working on tasks as they come.

today i finished the remaining things for the battle interface and notifications etc. but you won’t see much difference since all i did was get very liberal with canvas usage, layout groups and arrange everything in a comprehensible way for new programmer to work the new code. Apparently is working out great as he just told me the way i did things made him get some clean-ass code right out of the gate.

also finished a new enemy model and i’m gonna do another one tomorrow, then another one… i basically have to grind a bunch of these so we can squeeze the game mechanics for what they are worth.

I’m getting increasingly excited about the future. The way everything is just coming into its own makes my imagination go bananas thinking of of what we can do with all of this knowledge. I know i’ve said this several times but it’s something i can’t get out of my head.

fixed the probe placement (scene was being super slow at the old number), playtested and fixed some missing signal emitters from cutscenes, did the loading screen and re-did the battle interface for the upcoming refactoring. playtested the psy bar integration and the boss battle and tweaked it some more. Newprogrammer fixed a bug in the psy bar and made it look prettier, added a death animation for one of the enemies with a new sequence too, and now the game feels pretty cohesive and good-looking, we just gotta do the refactoring i mentioned. One thing newprogrammer did that i thought was pretty cool is a “master key” that solves any puzzle regardless of key item, saves me a lot of time debugging stuff without assigning the items before i hit play or make item pickups.

Tomorrow aside from pending battle ui stuff from today, i’ll move on to some 3d modeling for new enemies and send them to be animated. I’m still feeling a bit overwhelmed since there’s a sudden number of shit to do coming outta nowhere, but i gotta power through this. I’m overall a bit bummed since the progress i make doesn’t feel huge due to how time consuming certain things are but it’s still progress.

again one of those days where i spent a bunch of time on a seemingly small task but given the lack of expertise it ends up swallowing a lot of my day. This time was getting used to this tool that places lightprobes automatically that was giving me some headaches, but if it works well i’ll give em’ a free shout out. So far it all looks great, it did place every lightprobe where it had to and frankly the game’s ps1-esque look is giving me the benefit of not needing to adjust every single probe by hand.

Also began the groundwork for a save system and controller support, also with some assets i got. Other than that, i made a game over timeline (once the death animation is put back in i’ll show it, looks hella badass), playtested and uncovered some… left over bugs from the puzzle tools (a feature we forgot to fully test, basically) that were fixed, integrated the PSY bar for psychic skills, and made other visual effects to telegraph enemy attacks easier. I should continue that one tomorrow with some of the special attacks. Playtested more of the boss battle and it’s just turning out great.

This week will probably be just grind on things we’ve been sleeping on, cause tomorrow i’ll have to do the loading screen, playtest the whole level to check everything is working, then finally redecorate a large chunk of it.

a bit of a disappointing day as i kept myself busy with the menu stuff and got stuck adjusting a single animation for far too long. Good news is that i might be somewhat done with it, and also made a new gun. Tomorrow i should focus on polishing some of the earlier rooms in the level so they are more consistent with the rest of the complex, or extra story cutscenes. There’s frankly a lot to do and it’s starting to feel a bit overwhelming, but it’s a matter of isolating each task and just do it, instead of thinking of what needs to be done.

Newprogrammer started working really late so not much progress on the boss battle, but he’s now integrating some leftovers of the battle ui and hopefully tomorrow we can work on the same hours as we’ve been doing for a long time now.

gonna finish a bit early today cause fridays kinda demolish me but also because i have to do some errands. good news is that i kept working on the new menus and shit, finished a ton of it and only one section remains, and it’s all looking great. taking more time than i expected but hey, games of this kind deserve well-made interfaces.

newprogrammer is still working on the boss while i help him playtesting it and it’s closer and closer to our vision. really great stuff overall and somehow an exciting battle despite the (currently) simple AI. Once we do like more phases and special behaviors it’s gonna be one for the ages.

see you all monday.

nice day, spent all working hours playtesting and doing the new UI stuff, including the title screen and character menu, which we already had but it’s simply not working for me and we have a disaster in our hands that needs to be changed. Newprogrammer spent all day working on the boss fight using a prefab and controller i set up yesterday and it already plays fantastic, next step is to polish each attack and then give it priorities, phases, and all the good stuff a boss fight should have. I’m really looking forward to it.

i’m not too much into fooball these days compared to when i was a lil kiddo, nor into maradona, but since i’m living in buenos aires at the time of writing it’s impossible not to notice the energy on the streets. Lots of demonstrations in the city’s center where i live.

on the game development front.. it was one of those days, something really stupid broke everything and we spent most of the day debugging, turns out it’s the way we handle the UI… i knew that one was gonna bite us in the ass, so we gonna revamp that along with the character menu once we are done with the boss. The good news is that we fixed all that and began the groundwork for said boss, and hopefully tomorrow we spend all day doing just that, so we can call this level complete (in the way i’ve been calling things complete. If you’ve been reading for quite a while then you know what i mean).

Alright that’s it for today, gonna get some milanesa and play maybe more yakuza or tetris effect.

a bit of a disappointing day as i spent way too much time fixated on one stupid thing but progress was made. i linked all cutscenes and sequences that lead up to the last underboss encounter, fixed a bunch of weird behaviors caused by misplaced nav meshes, polished one of the rooms, and new programmer improved the AI for the underboss, plus added a couple more timeline tracks and playables to make it easier for me to open doors and add items during cutscenes. There are some other bugs we fixed too, but there’s a weird one still there where the player character would go between different idle state animations before reaching the right one, might need to move around that blend tree.

with this done i think we can safely do the boss tomorrow, then polish everything else and add more enemies. Current goal is to have as much as we can by december 15… which is where our vacations start, and we won’t comeback till january 6.

pretty comfy day even if i began late because of housekeeping (didn’t do it on sunday cause i was kind of dying from a headache). Almost finished the third section, now i gotta do the second midboss encounter, then the actual chapter boss.

Future tasks for the short term:

new menu, this time for real with a bunch of fancy shit
character building stuff
more enemies
more skills, buffs, debuffs, altered states
title screen
loading screens
save system

feeling really great about this, game’s going super smooth barring the times we’ve had to put down fires, but overall ultra comfy. this is my favorite part of game development, actual content stuff! I’ll wait till i have more models before i cut a trailer/make a formal announcement, since i wanna showcase some of the bosses.