been playing some more after a few rough patches. first half of the level is functioning, all prefabs work as intended and stuff. doing some polishing around the level as well but if i’m being honest i might start a new level from scratch, using the same theme but with a new layout. this is mostly because i commited the mistake of placing basic textures and when i do that i just get the urge to keep polishing stuff, making future changes a bit more hard even if the geometry is made with probuilder.

i need some documentation on how doors work but i made them work anyway. Some qol stuff on the way, like item pickup notification and some puzzle clues in the form of uhh, the classic notes and logs i guess.

My fear is increasing, i don’t know if the final design will be as fun as i had envisioned, so as soon as this basic level is rock solid in my own two eyes i will just shoot a build to friends to get feedback.

more playtesting. everything in the previous post was fixed! newprogrammer is truly the best girl. found more stuff but that was also fixed.

that’s it, it’s sunday and wanted to keep it light.

more playtesting, found even more bugs, including ones that we thought were fixed.

• sometimes battles don’t end, cause unknown
• can’t equip weapons for some reason (this was already done months ago, dunno what happened)
• wrong attack animations showing up after one battle, like the pistol’s when using a rifle
• both weapons show up as equipped in the inventory

the game is so broken is not even funny but gotta keep on fighting. kinda discouraging to see a bunch of things that were working fine suddenly break like this, and it’s not like they weren’t playtested, those were the first things we ironed out before this phase.

been playtesting and finding bugs that need to be squished, also realized that the controls need a bit more tweaking, namely changing the way you target enemies so it’s adapted to the new movement scheme. It’s playable but super uncomfortable and that ain’t gonna fly with me, it needs to be smooth like butter.

other than that i’m really feeling the structure, gotta keep testing more but things are looking up.

After many last minute adjustments i can finally playtest the game properly with all systems interacting with one another, pretty fucking cool if you ask me. It’s kinda terrifying though because while battles are fun and the puzzles are nice too, there’s this fear that even if it’s all working and feeling like it should the structure of the game isn’t as fun as i had envisioned, but that’s what iteration is for.

I also need to remind myself to never let players fall like this.

Some more texturing and level design, puzzle is ready and we just need to adjust the interaction system to start playing around in a comfy manner. In the meantime i just kept doing everything else that’s pending.

Tried to set up IK’s for the feet and results were amusing.

I wanna be healthy again!!

Been using the puzzle tool to design this one and it’s going great so far, just need to remember to write down some documentation for these since i forgot how to use an inventory system i wrote.

tomorrow i should probably start drawing concepts for enemies, i wanna show some gameplay without using graymen.

I thought cinemachine was my friend but turns out it also sucks for resident evil-style static cameras. then i decided to change the camera to an over the shoulder perspective, and as fate would have it, cinemachine is kinda made for this?? i spent the night fiddling with it and i like the results, little to no coding required.

i will keep the battles with an over the head perspective because battles were designed with a camera like that in the first place. cinemachine helps with another solution, in which it automatically blends cameras upon activation. that’s it! just a bool and it moves smoothly to the new one.

i surely hope this is the last time i have to fight with videogame cameras…

There are so many things i took for granted while playing games it’s incredible. Simple things like making a puzzle feel good in a non-puzzle game or making levels look like they could exist being the reason big budget games outright hire big penis architechs to do really cool stuff. The environments in something as cool-looking as Remedy’s Control are clearly the work of an entire art team and there’s so much i can do with the resources I have, but i’m not known for running from a good fight 🙂 though the point of this is that i went into this project thinking i had it all figured out based on previous experiments and projects, but it looks i’m still quite green in a lot of things and i plan to learn along the way. I don’t find any of this “out of scope”, i just need to hit the books now more than ever and have fun.

I love Tumblr because it allows me to bookmark a bunch of shit to use in my games and drawings as inspiration, from street photography to character design to box art, it all helps my brain to keep the creative engine going, so i’ve been mostly gathering a bunch of references for what i want. One day i will make a game that’s nothing but what’s in my brain, but the goal in many of the levels of this game are to make the player feel like they are in a lived-in world instead of a level designed for them.. or at least not make the latter bit as obvious, since i really like game-y levels.

Anyway, most I did today was die a bit and then keep texturing more rooms, plus the aforementioned research. I’m very close to give everything a solid look but the finalized look is still far away from being completed. Newprogrammer is likely not working this weekend so i’m gonna do some more environment things before we begin placing gameplay elements across the map.