Had to upgrade Unity because of the collaborate to plastic scm migration. It was… kind of a pain in the ass. The process itself is simple, but my computer nearly exploded and had me all scared. It had nothing to do with the engine update but the scare was enough for me to relate the process with my hard drive almost dying.

After that I spent most of the day adjusting collision boxes and cameras. Playtesting here and there, and setting up the base for the next map. I’ll try to have as much as I can by friday.

Newprogrammer finished the new save system but I’m yet to check it out. It was probably incredibly annoying, so I didn’t ask much and told him to relax watching AEW Dynamite.

Suzuki vs Joe was great, but the afterbirth was questionable.

Couldn’t do much since I had a medical appointment (every tuesday, in fact).

I did finish what I set out to do which was a sketch for the next level. Then some rudimentary menus to customize resolution since I have to test the game in other hardware to make sure it runs alright.

I have a laptop; a razer one from like 2017-ish. It’s pretty good and I recently swapped the battery, as the old one died and almost exploded (real). It’s not for gaming – despite the razer brand, so it’s a good gauge for how well the game is running.

We had a bit of a scare when I saw the game running at like 8 fps on that cpu and I was wondering what the hell was going on. Turns out it was running at 4k! The monitor is 4k, and Unity defaults to full screen at the native resolution. Tested again with 1080 and 720 res and it runs flawlessly.

Thing is, it should be optimized enough to run on a 2017 laptop at 4k. It’s a ps1-inspired game after all, right? Gotta look into that.

There’s a lot to improve when it comes to performance, but a lot of it also has to come once the levels are finalized and polished. I’ll need to list which items can be static batched, same with materials where some need specific values and tags depending on the mesh complexity, and a hefty etc. – can’t do that if every asset is a probuilder placeholder.

Newprogrammer wrapped up the first part of the new checkpoint and save systems, next is to polish some of the enemy behavior, then shops.

Including Saturday.

That’s right, I committed the sin of working on a weekend.

I haven’t done that in god knows how long. Probably years. But hey, I wasn’t doing it out of obligation or anything; I simply was having fun with the gameplay and I wanted to play more.

It’s the first time in the time since we began this project that I’m actively having fun with the adjacent aspects of the game that are not combat and it’s a total paradigm shift for me as both developer and a player/fan of what we’re doing.

As a result of that spontaneous need to work on the game this saturday I did in fact finish the preliminary map for this chapter, and tomorrow I’ll draw the next one. I was supposed to do it today but I got distracted by other things. Both work and irl errands.

I saw newprogrammer play the level over stream and I took many mental notes; mostly about the visual language of the level itself in regards to exploration that needs some tweaking. There were bits that weren’t meant to be seen but he went there anyway just because the was an opening. Stuff like that.

This week he’ll focus on the implementation of some already coded mechanics that are not in the current loop, as well as changes to the save system and in-game shops.

My personal goal would be to have at least half of the next chapter’s level already playable by friday. Then next week we design and implement a new boss battle.

Again, lots of work to do but now it’s all with real purpose and goals. It’s been a (sometimes extremely painful) learning experience but we’ll keep on trucking.

Spent most of the day putting together some of the last sections of this level, but also debugging and helping adjust certain things.

Some problems arose that need fixing asap. Chief among them that the hitboxes for some of the enemy attacks are busted. We don’t know why.

It’s actually quite baffling, since there’s no way it can do damage outside the hitbox, yet it does! It’s driving me insane.

We also fixed some kinks in how dialogues are displayed.

It doesn’t feel like I’m almost done with this level; if anything I think there’s like a whole nother half to it but it’s only one extra section that I need to put together, so I don’t know. Right now it feels short, but not every battle, npc, or item pick up have been placed in every section, only a few. Once I do that I can get a better idea.

If only battles stopped breaking!

A bit of a delay due to some personal problems but I’m back on the saddle. Current goal is to finish this current level by tomorrow by accelerating some of my process, then sketch the next one. It’s pretty much a sprint to have the entire game blocked out in the coming months and there’s a lot to do. Pretty excited about some story sequences and other cool details.

I think we’ll cut weapon crafting and simplify it with simple upgrades. Not due to any time consuming process, but rather that the game got to a point gameplay-wise where it’s simply more fun to focus on collecting and upgrading rather than mix and matching. But we’ll see! I haven’t decided yet.

Also, I worked on a jam game over the weekend. Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/xermatt-redux

Lots of progress on battles and the way they feel. Added more particle effects for hits, sound effects, all the good things. Continued work on the map I’m making for this chapter but stumbled upon some organizational issues when it comes to scene hierarchy and the like.

I almost had a heart attack due to that, since nothing was working well and the game fell like it was falling apart but it was a matter of properly organizing what I need for each scene and now I’ll build things based on that instead of the old guerrilla approach I was using. Made me waste a ton of time so tomorrow I have to pick up the slack and wrap up the initial layout.

There’s so much work ahead is not even funny, man. Hard to stay optimistic once it hit me. The sheer number of things I gotta do is quite insane but we’ll pull through.

It was a bit of a blackpilled week but it somehow ended on a good note.

We improved our prototyping speed and implemented new attacks for the player in a timely fashion (players can now use a melee-only build if they want!). Plus I’ve been having quite a bit of fun assembling the map for this chapter and I think it might be done sooner than expected. Again thanks to some key improvements we did to see results faster. Things feel less of a gamble and more of an entertaining set of experiments that no longer fuck the game up.

Next week is gonna be really cool as we add even more fun things to the battles while I assemble the current map. Story for this chapter was written a long time ago, and after some compromises to the format, doing implementation should be a matter of hours.

Sorry about the big gaps as of late. The combination of grind and general frustration about some designs not really working out in the expected ways has me quite worn down. By this time of the day all I wanna do is sit back and play Bloodborne.

It’s particularly frustrating because the combat we have is quite good and it will only get better; That part I’m so proud of. But I can’t, for the life of me, come up with a great loop. All the ideas we’ve prototyped are just boring, or I’m not experienced enough to pull them off and make it meaningful… It’s breaking my brain apart in ways I didn’t expect.

Like, not even copying the loop from other games is an effective strategy if I want to finish the project within my lifetime. The number of things I can do, and do well, is staggering. But none of those solutions will work in the short term. They’re investments that need to be done and require more manpower, experience, and a myriad of other things. It’s all stuff that I can’t realistically do by myself and one programmer in months time.

It sounds gloomy and spells doom at Sacrifice because it frankly is a grim scenario I’m facing. We’ve been in the process of downsizing in every possible aspect and I think what we have is attainable. It’s the actual gameplay loop that needs to be compelling and encourage players to see the full story.

I’m also worried about length, since the game needs to be at a certain price point for this to work and be profitable. I hate thinking in those terms like you wouldn’t believe, but such is life living in this fucked system. Art can’t proliferate if the artist doesn’t eat.

Work has been steady, though. Fucked up shit aside.

We’ve been working on the things we know are fun and can get better while writing and drawing level layouts. Discussing lore a fuckton over 5-hour calls, modeling props, texturing stuff… The usual grind. I think we have most of the game already written; at least the story, not the scenarios ’cause of the above issues.

This week I want to focus on giving the player more shit to do during battles and increase prototyping speed by adjusting some of our tools to require less steps to do simple things. Some of it is inevitable but a lot other can be better.

It’s one of those days where I think “man, if only I could do short games for the rest of my life and be happy”. You know, just doing whatever I want from a cabin in fuck-knows-where. Unbothered by life and people just enjoying my brand of shitty inconsistent art.

We’ll come up with something, and this will be one hell of a learning experience when it’s all said and done. Commercial and critical bomb or not. It’s just a matter of finding the sweet spot between ambition and reality. VA-11 Hall-A and every other small project was shipped successfully because they were all small from the get-go. This is legit the first time we set out to do something big, and boy, is it biting me in the ass now.

It will be fine. There’s always a solution for everything. All I need to do is escape the tunnel vision to see the light ahead.

Contrary to common belief, I have been working my ass off and totally not playing Elden Ring (I only took two days off for that!! and the weekends, I never work on weekends).

Most of the progress for the past few weeks has been focused on wrapping up the chapter we were making, fixing bugs, writing, designing, taking a hard look at the tools and see what can be improved.

Now after a huge scare regarding translations that drove the both of us to nigh physical deterioration, we managed to pull through and now we’re reevaluating the loop that ended up not being that fun after all. It’s only one dumb detail since the fixes are really easy to implement from a design standpoint, but not so easy to justify with the current lore so… yeah, big brain moments are needed. Such is the challenge of doing something that’s somewhat gameplay-first and we’ve never done something like that before at this scale.

All in all we ended up accomplishing a big milestone and once we clean up our tools we’ll start work on the next chapter in earnest. I’ve already began adapting my script to a flow chart, and sketching the first couple levels to test a new loop. Shit’s pretty fun so far and also advancing at an unexpected speed. Again, can’t give any sort of estimate but we’re getting there.

Now back to Elden Ring.

The chapter we were working on is virtually complete, but as I mentioned in the last log it will need some heavy tweaking once we go back to it. After careful planning I already know what to do, so that’s good.

This week we’ll focus on bug testing, do our first stable build, and generally just make things solid enough to update over time. Treat this as if this is an early access in order to update the base over time without breaking things.

There’s still a lot we gotta do to improve our current flow, but I’d say good work is being done so far.

Next in my list is to write one last bit of dialogue, then some concept art for a couple new characters for the other chapters.