Sukeban Games

Developer Diaries from the Sukeban Staff (mainly just kiri)

Category: n1rvanna

  • 6/16/20

    One of the things of having a log about progress on all the announced and unannounced projects i’m working on is that i can’t freely talk about them without giving the impression that i’m spreading myself too thin. I’m not! I just really really like to make games, so please don’t think the wrong way if i start writing down progress on what i’ve dubbed Project X, which began a couple months ago and of which i made some progress today by sketching out the sprite for another of the characters.

    finished the main bar ui in n1rvanna and adjusted the templates for the characters, and new programmer is still going deep into building all systems. It’s a bit of work since it’s a new engine with its own language so that involves a lot of googling for the small things, but even with all of that work has been steady and we might even make that self-imposed deadline i talked about yesterday. Next would be to finish other screens in n1rvanna, namely the hub, chapter selection and the new game mode i can’t talk about just yet. The assets are done already, i just need to put them together inside their respective scenes.

  • six quince

    still getting used to the new engine, but the good news is that i’ve laid out most of the ui and will probably finish it tomorrow. new programmer was able to get stuff going and do some tests by running content using the new workflow. It’s possible that this whole process of porting the game will take roughly one or two weeks depending on the issues that arise. If i finish early tomorrow i’ll go back to some pending stuff on project D, mainly fixes in one of the environments and start laying out a set piece i’ve had in mind for a while. The proyect is moving, finally.

  • Happy birthday Valeria

    So the next updates are going to be really fuckin’ weird. Thing is, a lot of time has passed since n1rvanna was announced, it’s the signature project and i don’t want people to speculate on things i can’t spill details on. In short, i can’t be as transparent as I am with project D.

    What I can say right now is that the development environment changed and we are currently porting the whole project to another engine. This won’t affect the content made, visuals or anything you can see on the outside that’s already out there (the game is not being remade from zero), but it does definitely mean the game will actually ship within our lifetimes as things will move ahead in a more consistent basis, even though i’ll give the impression that we are doing work that musta been done like two years ago.

    So the progress in this front is development of some tools, and how long it takes depends on today’s work. It’s likely that the week ahead will be dedicated to n1rvanna for this very reason, as we want to leave the game in a state where we just write nice stories, make pretty pictures and great music.

  • woke up this morning

    planned the outline for a big story arc in n1rvanna (this one took a huge chunk of my day, damn!), D now has functional camera switching during dialogue and also character movement, now the animation triggers follow. Not as much as i’d like but on the bright side i fixed my sleep cycle again.

  • Weekend progress not by me, small n1rvanna update

    So I took the whole weekend plus monday to do a game jam and the result was a nice vn! ( https://4331pro.itch.io/soulbrittle) It’s my first time writing something to completion and making music. Pretty proud of it even if I’m aware of its many flaws.

    Newprogrammer did continue and worked on a refactoring of the player character, and fixed missing menu features that inexplicably disappeared.

    Gonna keep working after this so I’ll likely start the last scene of the chapter and hopefully finish it too since it’s not that big.

    After that I’ll go back to the favela scene to set up jumps and playtest for flow. It’s a linear-ish stage so i don’t have to think about exploration too much, and i’m feeling like designing future stages like that.

    Last but not least: n1rvanna has been going through a rocky phase due to on-going health issues with its main programmer and we’ll be taking over its development as well, so he can focus on just writing while we do the heavy load. Hopefully this means a faster turnout.

  • 5/11/20

    Been mostly busy with n1rvanna stuff. funny how things like posters take more time than hard progress on a game.

    the menu in D is almost done, just a few adjustments need to be made and playtest the hell out of it during battle, since we might want to allow players to mod weapons during battle.