Not gonna be able to update this archive for a bit. Work has been consistent and going very well but amid some other changes I’m applying to my lifestyle I’ll need all the energy I can get. I’ve also been thinking of ways to actually improve the way I write these logs so they are more useful for me and the handful of folks who follow it. Not gonna make any promises but it’s a thing in the back of my head that I’d like to get around once I have the mental bandwidth.

I’ll go back to regular updates in maybe a week or two!

Back to the excel prison to write extra scenes. Plus a new environment.

Due to ongoing changes with the game’s format (to make it leaner and easier to produce) the story has gotten way cooler and cerebral. I’ve been relying more on imagery and symbolism to transmit what’s going on, which couldn’t have occurred without the limitations we imposed on ourselves. Now, this is already the style I like to go for (if you check any of my story-driven shorts you’ll get a pretty good idea) but the previous scale had me with more cinematic ambitions; now it’s a very unique beast that I’m as excited to figure out as the ones who will hopefully play it when it’s out.

Apropos of nothing but weekends are a double-edged sword. I rest the two full days but once monday comes I completely lose track of the immediate tasks. Good thing newprogrammer said key words key enough to snap me back into reality and do some cool work.

I do write down stuff to do and whatnot, but something’s lost when I don’t touch the project. I hate losing that momentum.

It is friday, I’m done for the week.

While I couldn’t work as much as I wanted, I did get to finish some tweaks to the boss fight and the outro cutscene for this chapter. I’ve been getting hella experimental with how the story is told and now I’m even happier about axing the longer sequences a while ago. Shit’s just TIGHT now. As if I found the actual soul and identity of this game.

Happy weekend.

Been working on cutscenes and animation. More specifically, I’m tweaking some cutscenes so they are shorter and moodier, and transplanting the dialogue from the subtitle layer to the normal dialogue boxes.

It’s a compromise I think I mentioned before (tired of putting up with Timeline being so buggy), but it’s working so far.

Added some extra animation clips too, this time for the shotgun reloading and better ones for rifle usage. We need to code the shotgun…

Speaking of automatic rifles, they do feel like automatic weapons now. Before it was kinda like parasite eve where it’d shoot one bullet per move, but with shorter animations and tweaked sound effects and particles it transmits a more accurate feel. Like you’re really shooting dozens of bullets in a short span of time. Now, this game won’t be realistic at all when it comes to guns, I’m just doing what feels good and so far this feels good.

Newprogrammer has been busy fixing some egregious bugs related to dying and not appearing in the right map, but I think he already found the problem.

Fun fact: upon entering the boss fight room, all my weapons, equipment and stats got reset. I got it all back when I died, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Once we implement the new cutscene I made we’ll look into why that happens.

Good thing we got the sites back online. I almost wrote my progress logs on twitter (lol).

I’m still in the excel prison but I’m almost done for now. Stuff with weapons aside I finally adjusted dialogues and such to fit some changes to the setting and implemented the changes in-game. Next step is to take our localization workflow out for a test drive and see what needs to be adjusted. Then aside from other minute details all that’s left for this level is to implement the boss cutscenes properly (there is one rn but I don’t like it), implement boss dialogue, and polish the fight itself (needs an extra attack and a smaller arena).

Finishing this level for real is gonna lift a massive weight off my shoulders cause I know the next one won’t be such a pain in the ass. I’m excited like you wouldn’t believe.

Oh, I forgot to mention this last week, but I worked on a new game with my friend spitko and I’m really liking the reception we got! The loop is scarily similar to project D but 2d and turn based (even the dialogue is in the style I’m aiming for), and it filled me with a lot of confidence. A signal that I’m walking the right path if you will.

Check it out here.

Not much to report. Our work has been nothing but comfy-ish grind where we fix, add, remove and polish all sorta things and just generally make the game as stable as possible before we move on to make the other levels pretty.

I’m also still in the excel prison writing…. everything.

Feeling like I greatly underestimated having to also write item descriptions and such, but it’s all fun. It never feels like it’s bogging me down or anything. It’s just that when you start a project and say “yeah, cool lore in item descriptions should be a thing” you never really consider the actual bulk it adds when you also have to do everything else in the game.

This is why unless I learn, or hire someone, to manage a larger team we’ll never make something as ambitious as this again – and the game is actually quite small compared to what we wanted to do!

I do have to mention that some life stuff got in the way very recently (already solved the situation) but it was weighing on me big time yesterday. Still managed to get stuff done but it made me realize, perhaps to nobody’s shock, that I should stop procrastinating on non-work stuff or else I get decision paralysis.

Goals this week are just finishing the shit I’m writing and further playtest and polish recent additions.

Things are going pretty well.

After much suffering things have finally calmed down.

Work for the past two weeks has been closer to a grind. This is Including but not limited to:

• Designing skills
• Designing weapons
• Designing augments
• As well as accessories
• in-game lore writing
• Dialogue writing
• Cutscene planning (not like the ones we used to have; these are more utilitarian and short)
• Heavy playtesting
• Bug fixing (too large a list)
• UI polish (make it comfier for gamepads)
• Concept art for areas that are still using placeholder assets
• Stabilize all systems so we can reuse everything for future levels in a safe manner

It’s hard to write these when work is so straight forward but things are looking up. The one thing that we might tweak/refactor is the dialogue system but we’ll see.

I do find it odd that most of my work lately has been staring at excel sheets and writing. Refreshing considering I’m always wrestling with putting things together. Though sometimes it feels like I’m not doing enough despite ending up exhausted by the end of the day.

Pretty relaxed day as I spent my work hours writing story blurbs for the chapter we’re working on. This task specifically has become quite relaxing since I’m no longer writing with the mindset of movie-esque cutscenes, but rather the connecting tissue between gameplay moments. I think it will make for a tighter story overall as I tend to lose myself in silly details if given too much leeway with word count.

Newprogrammer kept squashing bugs from our never ending list but things are looking good. Might do a slight refactor in some corners of the game’s system but we’ll see once the current tasks are finished.

This post covers from September 13 to 15

The past couple days have been nothing short of a nightmare. Suddenly everything’s broken, nothing made sense. There were even Xbox gamepad exclusive bugs and glitches. Like for real. Stuff happens using only that piece of hardware and not with dualshock 4 or keyboard. Turns out it was Unity’s awful new input system.

At the end we ended up getting rid of it and went for a third party API that just worked out of the box and the problems went away. There’s still a lot to fix, mostly on the side of data saving and loading and some other issues while equipping weapons. Thankfully most of these problems are easily solvable but some others require extra thought before moving forward.

It’s extra fucked up that this is happening as I begin to hit my stride with content creation for the game, but this is also my fault. Truth be told, I’m definitely not a good game director. Not right now anyway. Each time there’s a significant obstacle I try to pivot the game design somewhere else and the code ends up bloated, full of things that we don’t need anymore or that we need but are no longer there after a previous change in direction.

It’s rather ironic that in an effort to do less work we end up in this sort of situations where we’re basically clinging to dear life.

That being said, THINGS ARE FINE NOW. The fire was put out and we just need to focus on stabilize the game again. Not the first time it happens, and honestly the controller stuff was our main concern since we had ZERO idea about the cause. And it happened everywhere! I’d plug my xbox one pad on my laptop, tested with a fully working standalone build there, and the movement was still busted. Same story on newprogrammer’s side. As for the remaining problems, many can be solved in a single day and then we can move to what we were doing before Unity decided to get funky.

At least it was fun to play the game while shooting the shit with newprogrammer. Gave us a better insight on the gravity of the situation and we have a much clearer idea about what to tackle first. A BIG weight has been lifted off of our shoulders and the future looks bright once again.

Fuck Unity, though.

Here’s the single best advice I can give to anyone tryna ship a mid-sized game with this thing: Never trust their features. They’re all half-baked, broken. Abandoned even. They call it “Verified”, but trust me, they might as well be deprecated with the awful, awful support they are given. I think probuilder’s vertex snap was broken for a full two years until they finally revamped the whole thing in Unity 2021. Timeline doesn’t work, new input system doesn’t work. We’re using the localization package and I’m 90% it’s gonna make us rewrite the dialogue system due to shenanigans we’ll encounter.

Make your own tools, use third party tools. Be skeptical of literally everything inside Unity except maybe the editor. It’s the one thing I’ve been able to use in a consistent manner for environment work, and even then it shits and farts every now and then.

Anyway, time to sleep!

Excepting weekends I did do a ton of work since the last log (as much as my stiff neck at the time allowed). It’s just stuff I can’t log if I want to keep it a surprise.

Right now work on Project D has been a bit of a whack-a-mole game. Vanquish one bug, another one shows up. It’s a bit worrying, not gonna lie, but surely it will be fine at one point…

We did various minor tweaks to the plot so I’ll need to update some dialogues, and the contents from certain chests you can find in the maps. Some menus we… kinda forgot we needed them, and a million other things that I’m keeping a better track off but not worth mentioning here.

It’s fucked up that there’s so much to do, but content-wise the game could be finished in months. It’s a matter of making all systems stable and find the best way for things to just flow (items to find, when to find them, what numbers they provide…)