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.

Still grinding these while newprogrammer fights with the UI controls and the intermission segment.

We’ve been working on an assortment of things that range between normal content grind, fixes and general game loop. On my end it’s been mostly helping out with the boss fight, polishing and working the prototype levels, and most recently lots of prop making (I love this shit).

On the Newprogrammer front things are looking quite busy. After finishing the third iteration of the boss fight (the most likely to make the cut, since I like it a lot), I dumped a huge list on him about the next module: Intermissions.

Intermissions are exactly what it implies. A buffer between missions so players can explore, talk with characters and partake in a small assortment of activities. We aren’t going too ham with it since that would honestly kill us. Nonetheless, downtime is something I enjoy in games and thematically it makes sense.

The intermission includes a lil menu to close the game after finishing a chapter (or to continue if you want to keep gaming), space for cutscenes, title cards, and some mild exploration around the bigger open map in the game. In this hub you do the activities necessary to continue to the next mission, though you won’t be able to go back there once it begins. You’ll hardly miss things though, as none of the tasks are optional (for now).

This part of the game also rescues much of the groundwork we did for the previous game loop so it doesn’t go to waste.

Here’s a clip I made with some progress on the first 30 seconds of the game (chapter 1, map 1)

Things left to do: Fix colliders, add more fences, add a million cables, change and hide some of the chests, make the floor less dark, a lighting pass.

I really missed proper environment work!

Spent the day tweaking the boss fight by speeding up some particle effects and animations, plus working alongside newprogrammer on designing better patterns and behaviors over a video call. It was comfy. I think we got something cool going on with this battle and I hope players enjoy what I’m envisioning.

I’m also in the process of creating items and equipment to place inside chests with finalised names and descriptions. Plus their base stats. Very cool that we’re finally in this stage of making the game a real thing and also scary since it’s do or die now. Put-the-money-where-our-mouth-is sorta deal.

Gonna warn everyone though, and say right now that it’s gonna be a rather linear affair since I want to finish this game during my lifetime, and the presence of numbers will probably give players the impression that there’s a lot to play around with. But aside from weapon variety and upgrades, I’m not in the business of doing in-depth RPG mechanics when we’re only two guys building the game with many, many moving parts. I say this cause I’m using item placement and their stats as a way to determine how far into the game you can find them. A player who explores every corner of every map will be perfectly equipped to face whatever’s ahead. There are no levels or builds to play around with. Only your wits and a nice variety of upgradable guns, rifles, shotguns and swords. It sounds simple because it is, but I trust the design will be flexible enough to also not make equipment obsolete. In a perfect world you will simply pick whatever’s convenient for the moment without worrying about choosing one piece of armor over the other. Just go for whatever serves you best.

Basically a closet where you’ll always have things to use!

Enough rambling, time to sleep. And also don’t take my word for it either; plans can always change as we build this… like the lore that keeps being fluid as hell as we give every mechanic an in-universe context. Gonna be interesting to discuss that when the game is out.

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote a log entry. So much that I, in fact, forgot much of the progress made so I’ll list the things from the top of my head.

• New map is almost ready (only two more sections left), but had to pause it for a lil while as we worked on a boss fight. Part of it was me planning the patterns, picking good animation clips and doing particle work.
• Boss fight is up and running, but the moveset and pattern leaves a lot to be desired. Needs to be more difficult. Gotta add some follow ups and speed up the particles.
• Did heavy playtesting to find and fix lil things such as grenades dealing double damage and the game freezing while the boss decides what to do.
• Identified an issue that made player movement really unstable while using xbox controllers. No idea how to fix this. Will reach out to Unity if we don’t manage to debug it properly.

The above point was actually the thing that made us fall behind schedule. I thought it was something about the script. Newprogrammer kept adjusting to no avail, only to find out it was our xbone controllers and we’re as puzzled as you might be.

If any dev has faced something similar before is reading this do reach out.

There’s way more but this is what I remember, which is why I need to do this more often but the past couple weeks have been very hectic for my personal life. In a positive way.

In fact, it might be the first time in a long time where my personal life is much more fulfilling than my work life (I blame the movement issue outlined above that delayed a bunch of things). I want both to be fulfilling so imma focus on achieving that.

I also wanna say thanks for the nice words in the blog post I wrote last week about project updates! Made me more comfortable with sharing smaller projects. Perhaps another short game is in order. One that I can share with the greater Sukeban Games fan base instead of just my titter followers. lol.

Gave myself a long weekend to regroup. Spent most of my day drawing the new map and it’s almost done, just gotta figure out how to make the second half flow in more interesting ways. Newprogrammer finished a new set of menus for the characters that also serve as shops. We have this thing where you can find items, give it to em and in return they’ll give you some backstory about themselves. So we needed an interface that can accomodate for that and the shop menus.

I have to check all of that tomorrow. Once I have the map properly drawn I can start prototyping it inside Unity.

The current map is a special one; for it hosts the first ever boss we programmed and modeled. I’m essentially coming back to this with new eyes and experience, and I’m treading carefully as the first iteration of this level was responsible for us starting over again from scratch almost a year ago.

I checked my schedule and apparently I’m nearly a month behind the original deadline but that was to be expected. The previous estimate had me finishing whole large maps in a week or less, and after finishing a couple of those, two weeks seems like a more sensible timeframe.

When I make these maps I don’t polish them visually or anything. The bulk of the work is modeling the entire layout based on my initial drawings, then do some camera set up, door set up and then enemy placement. It’s working out just fine so far; I just wish there was a simpler way to handle doors that take you from one scene to the next.

Yesterday I built more of the map’s logic and camera set ups, but couldn’t do a whole lot today. My plan didn’t go as expected and might have to redraw a significant portion of an already simple layout. Turns out simplicity is sometimes harder to pull of than a complex labyrinth full of secrets and shortcuts.

I’m stuck on what to do, so I’ll go ahead and work on the chapter 4 map, then go back to the aforementioned one once I have a better idea of what I’d like to do. This is so I don’t get hung up on a single concept, end up hating it and delay the schedule over simple hard-headed attitudes.

Plus, the boss of this map ain’t even designed yet so it’s not like it’s high on the list of priorities.

Had a briefing with newprogrammer and settled on the final player progression, and I think it will be done by friday. It’s mostly all already there code-wise, just untested. So now that we have the save system working and looking nice it’s time we jump to that next level.

Game feels more real than ever.

Finished a first draft of the map I began last week and I’m now giving it logic. Needs more doors and battle zones.

Also made some new UI elements (new shopping menus and auto save icons)

Newprogrammer wrapped up the save system and now we’re gonna implement character progression. Much of it was already there but not included in the game loop yet. He also fixed some bits regarding character movement.

Tomorrow more of the same, plus debugging cameras again to test the new fixes.

Sketched a new level and prototyped a bit of it too.

Fun fact: This one is so three dimensional it was actually faster for me to just draw it using probuilder. Almost no camera set up either as I chose a single camera on a vertical dolly for the bigger section. It looks pretty good!

It’s going very well, and I consider it a big departure from previous maps. Layout-wise it’s definitely the simplest and there’s a chance I’ll be done with it this week. The focus this time around is battles and the situations occurring inside them.

Drafted a bit of dialogue too.

Current fear: That I lose patience and start making subsequent maps overly simplistic.

My plan to mitigate that is to come up with interesting scenarios so each map can be as unique as possible. Focusing on different things. I don’t think people will complain about heavy layout departures as long as we keep it fun and fresh, but we’ll see. None of these maps are polished and I can change anything about them on a whim if I want.

Gotta keep debugging cameras though, as the script we made for it kinda blows in certain scenarios. You can’t see it here probably but Reila’s orientation changed when the battle finished, making controls funky.

Yesterday was hell day where tools were breaking (thankfully not related to this project), fucked performance issues that mess with the game logic (sadly very related to this project) and adjacent issues that took up most of my time and couldn’t finish the map I’ve been working on. It was bad, but at least it ended on a fun note. Just playing elden ring with newprogrammer until a bit past midnight.

Today I did manage to wrap up the map except for some logic (keys and battle zones), so I’m gonna do that next monday.

Seems that every map will take me little over two weeks, not including polishing (texturing, modeling props, lighting passes… but that’s quick in comparison).

I’ve updated my internal estimates based on that and I’m pretty optimistic, providing we can fix the performance shit. That and how long it will take to design more enemy types and bosses but that’s all done in parallel on newprogrammer’s side.

I have five more maps to go, and one of those is rather small and not an actual level, so that’d be 4 big ones left. Assuming all level design and polishing is done in the next couple months, I’ll take a wild guess and say boss and enemy design will be the focus for the rest of the year. Who knows what will happen during that phase.

Happy weekend!