Sukeban Games

Developer Diaries from the Sukeban Staff (mainly just kiri)

Author: kiririn51

  • september 24

    forgot to update before going to bed hehe

    more work on the office scene, added more props and played around with another lighting pass, giving certain objects a very subtle specular that greatly helped to ground stuff into the world.

    also began blocking out one of the bigger, recurrent places so this one is getting extra care and i’m taking it slowly. doing the kits meticulously so it looks badass.

    newprogrammer is still working on more story creator features and it’s gonna be like this for a while more.

  • september 23

    back after a short made up holiday

    been modeling new scenes for the game, this time focusing on the Rozen Kreuz office. What’s Rozen Kreuz, you ask? well, the core premise of project D is that of a private bounty hunting agency pursuing… very unique outlaws.

    I thought the place was looking pretty already after the lighting pass so i took the chance to take a group picture.

    Reila Mikazuchi is the character i’ve been showing the most, but from left to right we have: Clark Renton, Reila Mikazuchi, Sarasvati, Faust Panzer, and Juliette Kidman.

    more details on them later!

    aside from this newprogrammer has been knee deep since yesterday with more features for the n1rvanna story tool and i’ve also been reviewing n1rvanna’s outline in order to iron out the bigger plot points and details. it’s coming along real nice!

  • late update from september 17

    most of my work on september 17 summed up to UI work and enemy design and reviewing new features like item crafting that still need some work to function just right. reminder here that i seriously need to get around polishing the rifle stance.

    i didn’t work on friday as i decided to finish my piece for the ghm zine and answer some emails for cool stuff we be cookin. i’m currently doing a small gamejam with newprogrammer so a cool game might be out by monday!

    Here’s my screenshot saturday contribution from this week. some fun grenade attacks that no longer break the player’s animations!

  • september 16

    made a big rework of the character menu, finally fixed a bug with the grenades, fixed another bug related to the game cursor not working correctly during item management and interactions not triggering, began working on the rooms from this section (there’s 8 of them), and apparently this new setpiece requires item crafting which we don’t have and wasn’t planned as a feature, but after talking about it we feel it’s the right thing to do so we’ll make use of item crafting now. i wish i could have gotten more work done, seeing as things are smooth atm but i keep getting a bit distracted due to weird sleep cycles. tomorrow i’d like to keep doing design work on the midboss, getting the UI to look just aight and polish battle stuff.

  • september 14 and 15

    Even more work on the current level but i’m happy to say this setpiece-thingy is almost done, only some aesthetic tweaks to some of the timeline bits (basically smoothly transitioning between puzzle cutscenes) and it’s gonna be ready to go. Made a small minimap real quick cause i was getting lost, but it’s fairly clean so i’ll just leave it.

    Did some design work for enemies and i’m about to jump to do a couple death sequences, plus start groundwork on the next set piece though groundwork is a heavy word, more like actually do it since all our tools are working just fine and i’ve been only asking for bug fixes, so shit’s smooth, very! It feels really good to make actual content progress instead of just systems. We could have reached this stage sooner if we knew more about unity from the start but having all of this experience in mind only makes me more excited about future games and the things we’ll be able to achieve in a short time.

  • september 11

    Was grinding a bunch of n1rvanna assets. Namely changing the background (we adjusted the setting of it a lot so a change was long overdue), creating sprites for some of the new characters we’ve been writing, among other stuff.

    my favorite customer so far.

    We’ll dump a bunch of info about the game sometime in the future, it’s all good stuff.

  • september 9 and 10

    lots of progress on one really specific thing that had me constantly bashing my head against the desk: cloth physics. thankfully during a sale i grabbed an asset called magica cloth and it worked like a charm.

    if she doesn’t make you play this song in your head then i’m not doing a very good job…

    i almost scrapped her as a playable character because i couldn’t get her skirt to look fine.

    the results are honestly fantastic and can’t wait to implement her battle style! one focused on melee and swords instead of shooty bang bang like the gal i’ve been featuring since the very start.

    I love her.

    Aside from this we fixed some really annoying bugs regarding puzzle interactions, that of which keep being the bulk of work when it comes to putting out fires it seems, and some pesky UI causing clicks from happening?? unity works in mysterious ways.

    on the n1rvanna front, i have a couple deadlines coming up it seems so i’ve been finishing some sprites out of concept art i made the other day, and a new background for the bar since a lot of the story’s backdrop changed in violent fashion and a lot of the visuals need to reflect this. we’ll update you guys soon for real about what’s going on there. Nothing bad is going on (not now anyway), it’s just that we did some kind of rebound in a lot of aspects of the game’s story and a lot of the promotional material out there isn’t even accurate to what we are doing right now.

    everything will make sense eventually, just give us more time!

  • september 8

    worked on character design (took a long time, this is an important character and one of my favorites so far) and more little cutscenes for the puzzles. got some tweaks from sophie so i’ve been working on implementing those while also newprogrammer finished some ui bug fixes and a problem with the reader’s buttons (they don’t wanna flip pages for some reason).

    notes for tomorrow:

    >design midboss for the section we are working on
    >maybe work on some drone animations when i have time

    i might start doing these updates after midnight like today because lol busted sleep schedule again.

  • progress for last friday and today

    on friday we were mostly fixing the interaction scripts to allow timelines to trigger within other timelines. this was pretty easy to do with signals, but took a bit to learn the general workflow of them. Timeline has so many tools it’s insane! i really love this feature. Did some more work on the puzzle too.

    today i did way more despite starting late, basically test the shit out of the fixes to the interaction scripts, polish some assets that were previously placeholders, and made some cutscenes. There’s one nag to figure out but that’s on me for not asking how multi-part puzzles work with the current tools. Ran into some lighting issues (point light not having much effect on the environment even when baked), and i think i’m half-way through this section. Just need to polish some of the puzzle design so it can’t be bruteforced (which i did during playtesting, so tweaks are on the way).

    Over the weekend i got some cool new designs for a really special character and i hope to see her in 3d soon.

    spinnin

  • i did my best

    went to see the new apartment, and i’m on the fence… but i was able to come back early and get some work done, mostly on n1rvanna since newprogrammer is yet to finish some stuff i need in order to continue level design in project D. worked on a long overdue design for a character we’ve been cooking for a while, and instead of being an asshole about it and keep it under wraps, here’s a doodle i made along with their character sheet.

    We also went knee deep on other narrative matters such as scheduling the order of the in-game days and which customers should show up at x or y date, and where to fit sam’s own arc.

    Tomorrow is friday and i possibly move this sunday, but like i said, i’m still on the fence about that… i really like my current place.