More playtesting done today. Found like a million lil things to fix and a fun exploit we left for the people who care enough about finding the right equipment.

I think there’s only like one thing left to do with the boss before we move on to the next goal. That next goal? Controller support.

Since it’s impossible we finish the story sequences before we go on vacation, we’ll give gamepad support a honest shot and see how far we can go with it. I doubt it will be fully implemented but at least battles will be able to be played with it.

Didn’t write much last week since 100% of the work so far has been a massive grind of playtesting and writing. Sometimes it feels as if there’s no end, but we’ll pull through.

However, we are a bit tired.

This will be our last work week and from this Friday to January 6 we’ll take a much needed vacation.

Things to do before that: Wrap up the boss fight (aaaaalmost there…), finish the writing for this chapter (only a couple scenes left), and that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t feel like a lot but holy jesus, this is hard.

As a funny note, this boss has taken almost three weeks to get right, compared to normal enemies that take not even a day. Two at most.

Goes to show how good I want them to be I guess!

Well, I did end up going back to writing and setting up the story sequences in the chapter and I think I’m halfway done. And after lots of tweaking and playtesting the boss is like 90% there, we just need to include one last attack we have planned.

After this we’ll focus on the rest of the chapter and giving players more stuff to fight with. We already included a buncha things before this but you know, game won’t be fun without a shitton of options for battles.

It’s a good pace we have here. A bit slower due to the season and we’ll take a short vacation toward the end of the month, but the project is coming along well. Still no desire to share an estimate for the whole thing but shit’s going well.

All playtesting. Been doing nothing but that.

This boss so far is really fun to work on, and I’m not at all bored with it, just concerned with how long it might take. We’re on schedule since I was actually able to playtest before friday, and this week will be all about ironing out kinks and playing around with the behavior but you never know what’s gonna happen. The other day we spent an ungodly amount of time fixing some really stupid shit, so yeah.

I might not be able to polish the story sequences this week either since I’m laser focused on that boss being fun, but at the same time it’s giving me lots of ideas and by the time I go back to those they’re going to be better than originally intended.

I wanted to show some epic webbums of the boss in action but I really want that design to be kept a surprise until at least the reveal trailer.

Most of today was devoted to sound, particle effects and animation, and newprogrammer is going through my list of to do’s, so I’m assuming a continuation of this for the next couple days.

Nice couple days just writing and designing quests. Wrote emails and I should probably write more stuff for the internet sections.

There’s a delay going on due to really pesky bugs that have been causing trouble for a while now. Grenades are still freezing the player and attacks weren’t dealing any damage either. The latter turned out to be a weird behavior with colliders that took nearly a day to figure out (gotta love that kinda stuff…)

Tomorrow I’ll keep building game stuff while newprogrammer continues with the boss fight. Still ways to go but this chapter feels nearly done. Might have to chill with the cutscenes.

Slept a bit better. Finished preliminary work on animations and visual effects for the boss battle while newprogrammer fixed the bug from yesterday. We both managed to finish all of that today so now tomorrow we start with the behaviors and the rest of the story sequences. Shit’s gonna rule.

I wanted to post a gif but I want the design to be a surprise.

Started work on this chapter’s boss but didn’t get to finish as many things as I wanted. Haven’t been sleeping very well so it’s affecting my concentration big time. This might continue for the rest of the week.

Also helped playtesting and found a really bad bug where players become frozen after throwing a grenade to enemies that are in the middle of certain attacks. Other than that everything is working as intended with the new info window and other tweaks I mentioned last week.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with the rest of the boss’ moveset and depending on the complexity of its behavior I might be playtesting that battle by friday or maybe monday.

Once work on the boss is done on my end (hopefully tomorrow) I’ll go back to cutscenes. Once we wrap up both things we’ll be exporting the first stable build of the game. After that comes localization tools, then a new chapter.

With this i’ve pretty much identified the amount of work needed for the rest of the game and I’m glad to say it’s very tolerable.

On my end it boils down to the following work per chapter:

• Roughly 3 new maps
• Visual effects, animation and some modeling for two new enemy types, plus a boss. Includes concept art if it’s not something I drew already
• Scenario writing and cutscene creation (both with the dialogue system and more elaborate ones with Timeline)
• Playtest the shit out of every aspect
• Some mild sound design

Sounds like a lot. IT IS frankly a lot for one dude, but this is bearable. Way more than with the previous design that added at least five more time consuming tasks. As development continues I’ll be able to re-use more stuff, making things go faster.

Getting there!

Yesterday I had a bit of a writer’s block so I did some environment work while newprogrammer was implementing new skills the player. I tested them today and they work alright except for a couple glitches. Noticed we needed a tooltip (sketched that one just a bit ago) and make the window go away after use so players don’t get confused.

Also today I wrote quite a bit inside the game and made whole new conversations that weren’t in the original script. Turns out writing based on the game scenarios is way comfier. Who woulda thunk???

Speaking of game scenarios: It’s something I actually never thought much about until now. In Va11halla I definitely thought of designing the game around “set pieces” like drinking with Dana and whatnot, but when it came to the normal gameplay loop I never had any concrete things I wanted players to do or go through since the goal was to have natural conversations with unchallenging gameplay in the middle. Some people loved, some hated it but that’s how it ended up.

With this one I’ve found myself coming up with scenarios first, then write around them. I now think in terms of “What do I want players to do?” which is interesting and makes me wonder in which ways N1rvanna will be benefitted from such mindset.

Things like this make me realize I’m essentially learning how to make games again, just from the genre shift.

Food for thought.

Writing this quick since I’m watching Dynamite.

Newprogrammer already has a preliminary version of the skill interface but has to fix a couple visual quirks before adding more to it. Namely targets not updating in the AoE preview.

I continued my work polishing cutscenes and modeled another character. Wrote some more dialogue that led me to a better idea for the scenario than what I initially did on paper so that’s really good.

All day modeling some props and characters I needed in order to polish the cutscene I’m also working on. Said cutscene is mostly finished, aside from some sounds and one more character that needs to be completed. I’ll get on that tomorrow.

Started to plan out more skills for the player and settled with a sub-menu function newprogrammer is gonna prototype tomorrow. At first we wanted a hotbar to handle skills like an MMO but since a lotta spells and such require you to preview the area of effect we might end up scrapping it for a fixed set of icons that activate different menus displaying all sorts of tools for combat. From items to healing skills.

None of this is final quite yet and has to be tested, but it’s one of those things we tried very early on but not as much as we should have – you can thank not knowing what the fuck we were doing with the game scenarios for all that time not spent playtesting combat.

In the middle of all of this the subtitle system for cutscenes broke, but thankfully we were able to patch it up relatively fast. It was sadly still time consuming.

Pretty good day overall. Tomorrow we continue working on those player skills and polishing the story sequences. I’ll need to write a lil bit too since the new design requires a more thorough approach for each scenario. Nothing especially hard to do, just… well, brain consuming!