Big month for the game’s development as we continue stabilizing and polishing all systems to make the base as robust as possible and able to actually support the game’s content. Been polishing the game’s script too. Some tweaks here and there but nothing that wild. Mostly giving names to organizations and making affiliations easier to keep track of.

So funny thing right: I was writing some dialogue and all of a sudden I asked myself “what the fuck am I even looking at” and realized I was mega lost in this story that I myself wrote and even documented in a wiki so this doesn’t happen… and it still happened, so I pulled back a bit and made a list of the elements that actually matter and tweaked the first level to feature as few characters as possible. This helped greatly since I was able to wade through the noise and feature the parts that I considered relevant, and whatever addition will be there because I deemed it to be key for the game’s story or its fun/mood/vibe factor.

So not really a rework of anything, mostly tweaking how I present what I already have and when. Some things that happen in chapter one got either bumped to chapters 2, 3 and 4, or got cut, or turned into something else. It feels great to have a game so modular I can simply change when players get certain story bits to make things interesting.

It’s been fun to also adjust the draft of the script as I implement the text. Allows me to grab very rough dialogue and turn it into something special while retaining the intent. It’s an obvious product of proofreading and editing etc. but since I myself am looking at the dialogue on screen with visuals and music I can adjust it on the fly so it hits better. Hard to explain, but even then this isn’t the final pass. I reckon there’s still at least two more editing passes before I can consider it final text.

In raw numbers… I can’t really say right now but the game doesn’t actually have that much text. This was the result of two things: me wanting to have some limits and constraints so I don’t commit suicide working on this, and also because the mood of the game calls for something that lets player piece together the mystery. What my inexperienced ass didn’t know, however, was that even games with “minimalist” dialogue are still fucking hard to write because I have to be so careful about what information is relayed to players, how and when. It’s fucked up. But I admit it’s still less work than writing a whole moffugging VN or some shit. Or maybe not. I’ve written long-ish games and scripts before and I didn’t suffer as much so I don’t really know what I’m talking about. It is what it is.

We’ve been focusing a lot too on certain aspects of development that were taking precious time from us, like the way localization works with certain dynamic elements and the way the game handles things like transitions, camera shakes and UIs. A lot of the game’s instability was caused by not actually knowing Unity that well so we’ve been adjusting some scripts to make use of more built-in solutions that can stabilize the game during all sorts of scenarios. It’s another one of those things that we learn with time, though we’ve also learned to not trust Unity on certain things. It’s a matter of knowing where you can leverage its millions and millions of lines of code with certainty. For example, I trust Unity events and Cinemachine, but I try my best to not depend too much on fucking Timeline since it’s broken beyond repair which is a shame because I LOVE that tool. Makes me feel like Hideo Kojima going cinematic n’ shit.

This August will be a bit complicated. My mood has been amazing after a bit of a terrible event, and I plan to keep that up but I have to plan for a travel later this month and I don’t know if that’s gonna throw a wrench in what we have going on but it shouldn’t. It’s gonna be interesting to see whether or not we’ll keep fixing long-standing issues in the next 30 days or if I’ll start blocking out more chapters so they’re playable.

That should be it for now. Not much in the way of extras in this post either. Not that much changed visually aside from assets that got polished but you wouldn’t know since you haven’t seen the previous iterations. The game is so weirdly put together anyway you’ll probably be able to datamine the old models from the final game, lol, and make the comparisons yourself.

Here’s a screenie anyway.

And a drawing I made of the game’s main character, Reila.

I really love how this one turned out despite being a relatively quick thing. Maybe I’ll turn it into the game’s box art down the line.

Which reminds me I have to start some concept art for new enemies and other things, but that’s just another one of my gorillion tasks in this project. Inshallah, I’ll never have to stretch myself this thin ever again on another commercial game. I’m having mad fun but I ain’t getting any younger if you catch my drift.

Kiri out.

June went by flying and I don’t have a good grasp of what I did from memory (didn’t write down shit like I said I would last month), but the bulk of it has been creating cutscenes, assets and polishing systems that the whole game uses (transitions, the battle system, enemy behavior, and so on), as well as creating new scenes to make the space in between missions feel much more cohesive and, hopefully, memorable.

Our priority at the moment is to stabilize everything that the game will use from this point forwards. You see, due to numerous changes in direction, we ended up with a bunch of dirty scripts and files that the game doesn’t use anymore. The game is literally running shit on the background that serves no purpose so that’s another thing we’ve been slowly chipping away at. It’s been comfy precisely because it allows me to focus on the visual aspects while the programmer does all the needed maintenance before we move on. There’s only one major thing we need to solve to avoid future headaches; mostly on the scene loading side, but shouldn’t take too long with proper planning.

I think this still counts as stepping on the proverbial gas, cause it’s mostly tasks that we sort of avoided while we took care of more important things. And now that we know what we’re gonna do for realsies the list has been getting smaller and smaller, as they depended on us choosing a direction for the project.

Spotty month, not gonna lie. This time of the year is fucked for me, but still managed to do a lot.

Omake

Not a lot that I can show this month! It’s all spoilers and I might have lost some of the videoclips I made too. Maybe next time.

Fun story: I worked like a week and a half on a very intricate introduction cutscene that was very good on its own, but once we implemented it… it seemed to be so out of place, lol. Like a trailer instead of a proper sequence inside a game meant to introduce players into the world. It’s good; not gonna say it sucked, but it didn’t fit the mood I wanted.

At least the above cut survived!

Note to self: Write progress as I go in a draft and then publish at the end of the month so I don’t forget shit I did.

May was rough for me, mentally speaking. Not because I was feeling particularly miserable, but rather that I’m still not used to seeing writing as actual progress cause all I do is put words in excel while the game itself remains full of placeholder levels and stuff. The good news is that I finished the game’s script. For real.

It’s still the first draft, and it’s the 4th rewrite this game has gone through. We’re pretty happy with the direction after a fun table read, with some adjustments to do and things to watch out for that I’ve been chipping away in between other tasks. One thing I really liked got scrapped, but that’s the nature of the beast.

After exiting the excel dungeon I started helping with playtesting, feedback, concept art, etc.

Finished the models for the base weapons, some of the boss rewards, all accessories, upgrades. Was a ton of work but thankfully we already had those written down months ago for this very moment.

Now that June is around the corner, it is time to step on the proverbial gas and do a sprint towards a content complete build. With the script done I feel confident with how the rest of the game is gonna play out.

I’m never making a game as I go again. Holy shit.

Omake:

Concept to prop, part 2.

I wanted to do more frequent updates but I’ll just accept that I’m not disciplined enough to keep track of my daily work activity like I used to.

Moreover, work progress has been steady and without much in the way of issues to cry about (aside from old issues still arising this far into dev).

I’ve been slowly writing the game (currently finishing the 4th chapter out of 7) and gameplay-wise the second chapter is nearly done with the exception of visuals and the boss fight that we’re still debugging.

I had a nasty personal thing happening a couple weeks ago and didn’t work at all during the holy week/easter (I usually work those dates), but we’ve been back on track-ish ever since. I was worried about a lack of direction and focus when it came to the story, but I was able to write a lot of dialogue without a lot of drama after distilling what I really wanted and tweaking some aspects that didn’t feel natural. Very few issues as well other than figuring out the goal of each interaction and making sure there’s no redundant info being given to the players.

I’m still insecure about a lot of it but that’s just how creative work is. I’ll never know if this is any good until you guys play it, though in my head it’s all pretty cool.

Current goal is to actually finish the game’s script for real this time. There’s been some moments where I felt the whole game was already written, or that I was much further than I thought I was. But now that I’m doing all of this with the finalized structure I can safely say I’ll wrap this up very soon. It’s gonna be my priority despite not feeling like real work (something I struggle with a lot with when I do story stuff only).

Hmm, maybe monthly updates are a nice middle-ground instead of being vague every day about shit. I don’t wanna stop writing these logs but they add up!

I mentioned that I would update more frequently and that I would find a more optimal way to write and archive these, but none have come to fruition. Not gonna worry about that, I just find it funny.

Been pretty busy with non-work stuff for the past week and a half too. Just lots of things going on between paperwork and problems in my apartment that needed to be figured out.

Lots of progress, though.

While I can’t list everything, much of what was accomplished has been quite big. The task that took me the longest was writing the game’s lore inside a local Wiki that I can cross-reference while writing. I decided to do this after noticing how much redundant dialogue there is currently, and in order to avoid this I had to find a way to properly order my thoughts and ideas on this world we made. You know, to make sure every piece of dialogue is worth having in the game and that they all provide something different.

I was also able to build the whole “second” level and make it playable relatively quick. A friend tested it and I’m on the right path, I just need to fix the latter half of it with a more interesting backtrack. There’s a new type of enemy already implemented and I’m currently drawing new concept art for things that need to be modeled.

Working on a new level but I keep getting owned #screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/I22FBqnAso

— kiri (@kiririn51) February 18, 2023

The bulk of work has been what I mentioned about the lore, which took most of the past month (two and a half weeks, I think) and I’m still not done. It felt as if progress suddenly halted but it was needed.

Another thing we needed was to clean the project and do some light refactors, like getting rid of code we don’t need and make elements in the inspector easier to read.

I’m pretty excited since most new features are all small and they don’t require much maintenance. Only issue at the moment is finding a good way to debug gameplay but we’ve already built a bunch of tools for that. I just hope we don’t forget to turn them off for the final build.

There’s this pesky issue that keeps happening where players spawn below the desired geometry and it’s driving me crazy, but it’s so far limited to two rooms. Maybe the fixes haven’t been applied to those.

Here’s hoping I can regain the rhythm I had before the crazy week that happened.

Omake

Gonna post some concept art since it’s all cool stuff you’ll see anyway, or won’t make it to the final product.

This is how the man currently looks like in the game. I tend to model the very essentials such as shape and main colors first, with the final size too in order to iron out details before texturing. The current process takes a couple days from concept art to first playable version. The whole thing involves rigging, some crude animation work and basic particle effects just to get all references right.

Illustration of the main character, Reila.

I had a lot of fun doing this even though it wasn’t part of my plans yesterday. I’m glad I didn’t stop myself from drawing it since it allowed me to find the feel for certain things I was having trouble with. The game is finally acquiring its final form and I love it.

Let this be a reminder: It’s okay to find the soul of your work along the way.

Work on the second boss fight is underway. We have three of those already done but this one belongs to the second stage, so it’s the second boss…

While newprogrammer does that, along with some housekeping to the enemy AI code, I’ll be redesigning some parts of the new dungeon since it’s not really all that fun after actually playing it.

I think I like the way I made the previous one much more, so I’m combining that with the ideas that were already implemented. Sucks to trash a lot of hours spent on this level, but such is the prototyping phase.

At least said prototyping is much faster now and I can identify unfun bits real quick (or so I hope…)

Current big issue seems to be geometry not unloading but that’s likely a typo in one of the strings. I’m not too worried about that. Goal for this week is to keep iterating on this map to make it as fun as it can be, while also playtesting the boss fight. Dialogue’s already written so that’s cool. It’s all about assembling the dang game.

I could swear I updated days ago but looks like I dreamed it.

We struggled a bit stabilizing the game after plugging in the second chapter (mostly due to adding things that weren’t accounted for in the intermission segment), but the game is running well again and I’ve been assembling the logic of the second chapter’s map. Thankfully most of the work was done last year! All the base geometry and camera set up was dealt with by past me (thank you so, so much, dude) so now I’ve been adding battle zones and dialogue. Process has been comfy with no tight bottlenecks outside having good, swappable placeholders for new skills and attacks (a lot of the time I have to set stuff up for newprogrammer but sometimes I’m busy with something else so it slows down some tasks).

Some housekeeping is in order, but the next big task for us boils down to designing the boss battle, two new enemy types, then implement the planned weapons and skills.

Ah, the sound of a game being made at a good pace.

Still anxious about the story and writing but it’s nothing I can’t fix.

Omake

A clip I posted on twitter and discord that for some reason isn’t here:

Let's lift the veil of mystery for a bit! The battle system as of now is focused around weapon type variety and being able to combine them with other tools and skills to manage all sorts of enemy groups.#screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/tXvLA5rvlN

— kiri (@kiririn51) February 5, 2023

The game already looks better than the video above (gameplay was captured late last year).

Week’s been pretty smooth. Lots of environment work, writing, and editing dialogue sequences. Some bug fixes took care of very serious issues, and thankfully it wasn’t anything particularly hard to fix.

I think the biggest breakthrough moment this week was figuring out how to balance the work needed for the intermission sections. These required a lot of energy from me in their planned iteration, but now they seem to be pretty comfy to pull off. They will be light on sequencing, and the dialogues can be written fairly quick.

I’m still curious on how long it will take us to finish the second chapter but we’ll get there as soon as we plug that in.

I know for a fact that I can do a whole level playable within a week (without polishing the visuals) but there are other more nebulous factors such as enemy and boss design that take the bulk of the effort in this game.

And that’s a good thing! Like, compared to how we planned to make this thing I’m actually pretty damn thankful most of the work boils down to designing interesting enemies and situations. The rest is normal things I can schedule without a lot of drama.

Some of the scenes I whipped out in the past couple days.

The game is feeling more real than ever.

Omake:

I’m using a shader for the depth of field effect, since it gives me much cleaner results than the post processing stack. Also, take a look and how simple these environments are!

And the cool shining effect was done with particles. After I took the screenshots I noticed particles were stretched vertically instead of horizontally, so that’s already fixed and looks better than the gif I posted.

I went back to the excel prison to write dialogue for the second chapter. Looks like the game needs more words than I initially expected after reducing the scope… but it’s manageable, I just doubt I’ll have everything in one week. Had a bit of a creative block too due to several matters unrelated to work.

We made some changes to the way dialogue windows work. Now they don’t use character positioning on camera but rather fixed waypoints on the canvas. Makes things faster but I also had to go back and alter every single dialogue from the first map lol and I really wanna move on.

There’s still some issues with cameras that keep giving me blackpills to swallow and I’m not sure I want to make this game with fixed camera angles anymore. I literally spend too much time adjusting that shit.

Aside from this things are going fine. We’re yet to implement the second chapter (there’s a bunch of things that no longer work due to outdated prefabs) but it’s gonna be next week’s goal for real.

Still nervous about the game becoming too big to manage at code level but that’s what we’re trying to avoid by fixing all situations in the current most polished chapter and identifying bottlenecks. For now it’s time for the weekend.

By the way, I made a new game and you can find it here. It’s a short VN; another one of my writing attempts in order to get better at it. Managed to drain a lot of emotions with this so I hope you guys check it out.

Let’s see if I can keep it steady. Not gonna promise daily updates but they should be frequent; at least in theory.

It’s impossible to list everything I did ever since I took a break from this archive, but it’s basically all good news.

Got the game stable enough (save for some elements that need to be less reliant on cross-dependencies), the first level is on a fair level of polish and now we’re adding the second one that’s already prototyped into the game proper.

There’s a shitload of things to do and fix but I’m optimistic.

The one thing that’s still murky is the story. I’m rewriting it so it makes sense with the current format. My old scripts were more cinematic with the larger scope of the previous iteration of the project so now I gotta go back and do it all over. I’m planning to pen the whole thing by the end of this week or the next.

Feedback with some friends who playtested the first level was positive. Game didn’t break too much and seeing people dig the combat was relieving… but the reaction to the story, or lack of thereof, is the thing that’s got me worried, and the very reason I’m gonna focus on writing for the next week.

We took our holiday break by december 15th then went back to work last monday.

That should be it. I hope this year is the year!