so aside from some bugs i found i really like how combat feels now. everything is snappy, there’s excitement, strategy, it’s no longer mindless. i was able to cancel attacks by timing my own actions, take cover using other enemies, it’s really great, and some of these were unintentional in our design so it feels even better.

still blocking out the last scene as i got sidetracked with other matters, such as updating the dialogue system and setting it up to work with the new interaction system. now newprogrammer is gonna do the final touches on it to allow fast cutscene creation.

Like in the past few days i’ll keep working after i write this update. So basically go back to the scene, planning for the others, and decide what i’m gonna do with the first finished dungeon. the layout itself is fine, but lighting is giving me headaches, so i might have to re-do the layout again taking into account how this engine handles illumination.

small places are great because it allows me to bake detailed lighting quickly.

next is the last scene and i already have in mind what i want to do. I won’t spoil that bit so don’t expect screenshots.

Jump stuff is almost done. We only had to fundamentally change how characters are assembled but i think we needed to optimize that anyway. We have more freedom now as a result. Gotta keep debugging though.

started late today, so i’m gonna keep working after i write this.

Began blocking out the new scene from this chapter, new programmer is still fighting with jumps. to be fair we didn’t plan the way characters are constructed inside the engine accounting for jumps so things have gotten more complicated than we anticipated. hopefully it’s not gonna make us waste more time. At least i can use it in its raw form to keep playtesting moving forward.

Or at least the parts that are going to repeat the most. This area won’t see that much detail in the end since it’s gonna be like a chase and players won’t stop to look around. Next is the dead end and the destination, with that this chapter will be done and i’ll be working on the third one. Order hasn’t been decided yet.

Still debugging the jumps, it’s a bit of a fight since this is a first for us and we have no idea what’s the right way to do this in unity. All fun.

fixing bugs regarding the jumps, working on more characters and basically trying to finish what’s left of the current level with a fresh mind. i should probably hire a concept artist for the next game since i suck at anything that’s not charcater design when it comes to that aspect of game development. i say this because i work on the look of the environments just from photos without actually drawing anything down to get a feel on paper, i do everything on the fly trusting what’s in my head.

aside from some unfinished assets and features, this section is almost there. i consider levels “finished” when everything looks just barely like what i have in my head. Obviously there’s still a fuckton of detailing to do, but feel is important and if i can block every level with a minimum of atmosphere i can feel confident in case we have to ship on a hurry. I doubt this will happen but better be safe than sorry.

One feature we are making are jumps. Not ready yet since it’s being programmed right now, but the idea is to have small segments where you gotta jump between platforms action movie style. This is an rpg-ish game, not an action adventure romp, so you don’t actually need any twitch skills to pull off the jumps, it’s more of a scripted thing to spice up the traversal.

Once all of this is done then it’s back to finish the cutscene editor and the next section of this chapter, which is a really long highway.

hmmm now i don’t think this is gonna be faster than the previous level, it just feels like it’s going faster because i’m having much more fun doing this one. maybe the game should feature more outdoor areas such as this. newprogrammer is gonna add the new attacks when i go to sleeb.

>some quality of life things such as tips now show up during battle
>the favela level is almost halfway there
>bugs regarding weird positioning during battle triggers have been fixed

we decided to just expand our dialogue system instead of using a third party solution, i was wasting precious time trying to learn and frankly speaking we don’t need much, just animation triggers and camera swaps. actual cutscenes can be done using timeline just fine. couldn’t do much else on the actual project since most of the time was spent planning our next moves. we had a call to define where to take certain things and everything is looking up : )

bugs regarding some of the enemies were fixed, now we can actually add the new attacks. for this level we have three new enemy types now and i think that’s a sweet spot. progress on the favela level will continue when i wake up.