more playtesting, i was finally able to isolate the weird bug in battles: apparently if the player falls from the second floor, any battle after that will teleport the player to the previous floor. weird shit, dude, but hey, at least i got to isolate the issue.

i also realized that one of the key weapons should be obtained after the middle instead of before the boss, so the player learns what it does. this goes alongside the introduction of a new cool ranged enemy type we just made.

also i began production of assets for the level. i still don’t know if i wanna do this entirely in blender but i’m exploring several comfy options that mix both probuilder and blender.

decorated the rooms and adjusted every battle, and after struggling a bit with the tools and my own stupidity i can say this is done and all i’ve been doing is playtest over and over.

to do next:
>need to adjust the new interaction prompts
>make doors that can only be unlocked from one side
>animation for falling and landing
>do a gizmo for enemy attack reach
>make two more enemy types
>battles in the hallways keep breaking for some reason

man, i love making games but as i get older i realize why games are made by more than two people. i could be doing a lot of things right now but here i am, placing battles with only one enemy type accross a level just to test, then test, then change and test some more. can’t pay a level designer so gotta suck it up and do my goddamn job.

at least we started more enemy types today!

the level i grayblocked the other day is roughly complete, only the puzzle before the boss is not implemented yet cause we want to test the flow of the level before worrying about that one. we gonna play the shit out of this and hopefully complete this by the end of the month. judging by the speed in which i made this it’s possible we can have all levels of the game done in one month… all gray blocked of course.

newprogrammer is going to implement more skills, namely one magic attack and one healing magic, among other fun stuff.

what a chaotic weekend i just had. we shipped a really nice game in three days called Isochronism and you can check it out here: http://dev.comeonandsl.am/dev/LD46/

been testing the new models from thundercloud, gotta fix the skirts and dresses.

newprogrammer finshed gamepad support, but my 360 pad stopped working so now we gotta look into ds4 compatibility. problems with hitboxes were sorted out too.

this week i wanna get into implementing more fun battle stuff and go over enemy designs for the minions which are like 50% complete.

been avoiding work in order to regroup myself since i’m going through stuff again. did some playstesting and progress in general hasn’t stopped. the 3d art team sent new characters.

and merenge designed the first boss. won’t show her concept art just yet : )

newprogrammer is in the middle of adjusting pending matters for the gamepad support, like menus and the like, and lerp movement was added to the targeting to make camera changes smoother.

i’m probably getting back in the groove tonight with the level design stuff and then take the weekend to participate in ludum dare, so expect a nice new videogame soon.

alright i quickly grayblocked a fairly large level during the morning. more complex than the previous one but somehow smaller and tighter. this is a different style and is a more traditional structure. let’s see how this goes, pretty curious about which is the best approach, but i’m liking this so far. I managed to get lost a couple times in what’s a simpler layout and i take that as a good sign.

some notes for later:

>combat in close quarter isn’t nearly as tested as we thought and i saw some issues with colissions that lead to ugly clipping.
>play around with the hp bar position
>once the level is done, replace this geometry with actual modular meshes, texturing these walls seems to be slower and counter productive than replacing stuff

the memory leak was caused by a post processing effect and saved us a bunch of hours of debug.

i’m still studying and researching about level design to make things more interesting. i’m almost there! and i need to also come up the three enemy types that will show up here as well. Most of what i’ve done today amounts to things on papers, general planning and direction on what i want out of this vertical slice. i assume it’s gonna take me a couple days more to get out of this research phase and begin doing the stuff. the level so far was a great exercise and it’s time to go all in. Feels like i’ve been saying this for like a month now but we are technically already in content generation phase, so i’m gonna repeat myself a lot, especially while i’m still trying to find the right workflow when it comes to building each levels.

I’m gonna scrap what i have for now and streamline everything i learned into a more cohesive map. results soon. also leaving a reminder to send builds to friends, since the game is already working and has a nice demo level with enemies and puzzles.

I noticed that the game would slow down severely over time. This wasn’t very obvious because i had an fps cap in place for uhhh, ps1 immersion but things were getting so choppy between playthroughs that i got rid of it. turns out the issue is a memory leak, and since the game was choppy all along on purpose we never noticed.

so this week is gonna be all about refactoring the code! the code itself isn’t that much of a mess, but we were using solutions we thought would prevent memory issues but those solutions were the problems in the first place. i don’t expect this to take very long since it only happens in one scene, but fun progress isn’t to be expected in the coming days.

in other news, i noticed i had dynamic bone in my assets folder and quickly set up some hair physics. looks pretty nice!

not a lot other than playtesting, now with a new targetting system! it works like a charm and the game now plays like an actual videogame instead of an interactive mess.

i also got new models from the folks at thundercloud, look at this cool stuff.

the bottom character was designed by the lovely merenge_doll on twitter, who’s been working with us for a while now as a sukeban employee.

my job right now is merely creative. coming up with new enemy types, kickass level design, character design, writing… i love it, but sometimes doesn’t feel like i’m pulling my weight compared to the rest of the team. such is the joy of having fun doing what you love.