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…)

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.