More playtesting. Shit just keeps breaking for no good reason! things that were fine are now broken despite not touching them in nearly a month! what the heck!!

Seething and malding aside I did some writing for the boss fight, drew reference art and modeled and textured the character I mentioned yesterday. Been pretty happy with the process so far! Stuff just comes out really fast and I’m actually excited to model the rest of the cast and the enemy groups.

Happy weekend.

Textured the enemy model I was talking about yesterday, playtested some more (game seems to be broken for no discernible reason, like, we took that break and when we opened it there were bugs out the ass that weren’t there before) and did extra tweaks to the lighting.

On the subject of lighting: I’ve been using bakery, which is faster and gives better results than the built-in lightmapper in Unity, but sometimes when I load a scene I have to recalculate the whole thing again since the UVs get corrupted. If anyone knows what I’m talking about feel free to get in touch cause shit’s annoying and time consuming to fix.

As for texturing, Blender has been surprisingly comfy to just paint whatever model I have around. Dunno why it seemed so bad before but now it’s even relaxing. It’s like airbrushing a model kit.

Newprogrammer is gonna log in after I’m done with this so I’ll have to check the fixes he didn’t get to do yesterday tomorrow. I might either texture another model or continue drawing concept art for another character that REALLY needs to stop being a placeholder.

Current plan is to somewhat polish most of the assets needed for this chapter (a lot of them will be reused so there’s that) and move to the rest now with with a solid loop. What I mean with this is being able to play the other levels like a player would instead of playtesting everything in isolation.

• Cleaned up the project a bit
• Upgraded the FMOD plugin (broke the music and introduced a weird quirk, but it’s no longer erroring out the ass)
• Did a lighting pass to some maps
• Tweaked color correction in some scenes
• Tweaked the intro once more
• Playtested and found a lotta bugs for newprogrammer to fix (one of them looks scary, as it completely breaks combat after you die and won’t let you use doors)
• Finished a model for the concept art I made

I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting something but that was today’s work. Tomorrow I’ll keep playtesting and adjust some enemy models that look like crap. I should also check progression to see what needs to be ironed out. Last time we changed it so armors have to be bought and not found but haven’t checked if it’s fun or nah.

Finished an npc model, reworked the game’s introduction using newprogrammer’s idea, worked some concept art for a boss.

The introduction stuff is interesting.

We wanted this game to be rather cinematic. You know, inspired by the CINEMATIC RPG itself it had to have something going on along those lines… but the game has taken too long to be made. Tools like timeline I’ve found are too unreliable and buggy for full production (as is basically everything in Unity…) and I can no longer count on those to fully achieve what I wanted. Plus we’re running short on some resources and cutscenes as they were being made are absolutely not sustainable in the long run.

As a result the game is way… cooler?

Weird to say after saying we’re, once more, cutting stuff in order to finish this. But the reality is that once I stopped worrying about cutscenes and made the story integrate more naturally with the gameplay, the mood itself is closer to the vague feel that kickstarted the project.

It will make sense once I can share more specifics.

I don’t know if development will pick up soon since there’s still some quirks we have to iron out, but considering I had to make a mental shift from “putting out fires and work placeholders” to “write actual story and create finalized assets”, I’d argue we’re very close to that sprint that actually goes all the way until the content is complete.

Also, let it be known that I might be close to having burnout. Yesterday something happened that made me question the way I go about things – where not even taking breaks makes me feel rested, and the thought of doing art was giving me anxiety. Gotta take more care of myself, especially coming out of a long-ass sickness period.

I’ll be on the lookout for that sorta thing. I need to take care of myself more often these days so don’t be surprised if there are more gaps in posts. I too wish I was a normal person who can just work consistently, but that’s how things are at the moment. Better times will come, I hope.

Finishing a bit early today since I’m not feeling too good. Stuff outside work that’s in my head.

So for the past couple days I’ve been knee deep in writing and sketching the cutscenes for the boss fight and the chapter’s ending.

We settled on having at most three cutscenes per chapter. It’s normally the intro, dialogue before bossfight, and the ending. It’s fun work but I’ll have to call some animators in the near future to do a good polishing pass on these.

Newprogrammer finished some critical work on visual quirks.

Hella nervous, but progress is steady. Realized I work really good if I limit myself to a non-stop rush of 5 to 6 hours per day starting in the morning if I can. Sometimes I go way above that but I try to keep it chill.

Happy birthday, va11halla!

I have once again forgotten what I did in the stretch of time I didn’t write on here. However, work has remained daily and steady.

For one, the level has been pretty much done for a while now but we’ve been focusing on what I like to call progression. Item placement, stats, balancing, names, descriptions. Things like how much money to give per fight, how much will players have by the end, how many times they can upgrade weapons. These sort of things on their own are surprisingly time consuming but fun to deal with. We’ve found ourselves in this moment of development where everything has been consistent content production.

There’s still lots of fixes and systems to implement, but most are in revision phase to check for balance. To see how they work, if at all, during normal gameplay.

It took me a while but I also finished the game’s intro, which I can see myself changing endlessly before the game releases. It’s a very important detail to set the mood so I have no doubt in my mind I’ll get really annoying when it comes to that.

We also added new enemy types, weapons, item effects, fixed the UI controls (didn’t know how to use Unity’s built in handler)… there’s a lot that was done! Much of what’s next consists on visual quirks to make things look extra polished.

It’s complicated to discern what are the elements that need to be done once per level, but for my sanity I will assume it will be dialogues, cutscenes, bosses and enemy types. Those I can handle.

Gotta love progress. This thing is moving at a scary speed.

Finished two more scenes while newprogrammer struggled with something he solved last week but forgot. Don’t ask.

With that I should be done with the first pass of polish on the first level of the game. We connected the second level to the intermission segment so the game will soon be perfectly playable with the finalized progression. Possibly this week.

It’s really cool cause I’ll get to play as we build it in a way similar to what an early access game is. Except it’s for us and not the public.

Little by little. Only two more scenes to go.

I’m sure a lot will change over time since we’re yet to do playtesting with a larger crowd. This is the main reason I haven’t even started thinking about the lighting yet; that shit is fun but takes so much time to get right, and once it’s settled the level becomes ridiculously hard to adjust. Better keep things simple but good looking so the iterations don’t become a pain in the ass.