Lotsa work on the battle system. We gave the thing sound, brought back some camera effects that were missing from this iteration, adjusted some animations and changed around a couple UI elements and flair. Fixed bugs too… Stuff’s looking great.

Coming days will be all about implementing new enemy models/types, juice things up wherever we can, and generally just making this as fun as possible while I go over the chapter and implement the scenarios already written.

It really does feel like this is a real game that might launch soon. Just gotta do our best and make these encounters truly great.

Here’s a funny bug from earlier today. Letters will get scrambled after changing targets rapidly. Hair looks funny too cause the physics take time scale into account. Need to disable that later.

Last week ended on a bit of a downer emotionally speaking so I took some extra time to rest. The player’s computer is done and I’ve been modeling new enemies from a concept art I drew a few weeks ago. What I did here was to complete the basic shapes and colors, rig, then throw inside the game for adjustment. This helps when designing behaviors and tweak general battle “readability”.

Newprogrammer was working on a new timeline tool but we had to scrap it and replace it with something simpler and easier to maintain – much to his chagrin.

Made some further adjustments to the template scene we use for all battles and its camera behaviors so we can bring back some juice we had in the previous version. Tomorrow we begin a long road towards having great combat, and hopefully I get familiar enough with the story tools so I can tweak all of that in the meantime.

More environment and design work. Drew a couple characters between yesterday and today which I have to model, plus I gotta model some enemies pretty soon (already designed!). Also some mild UI work (lil thingies for notifications and prompts).

Newprogrammer is almost done with the BBS feature, tomorrow he will tackle the news sites.

Current plan is to work on some enemy models before he’s done with the computer features and the timeline tool. Not sure if I have to texture them but I do need like the basic shape going on so I know the thing is actually readable during battle. Perhaps instead of texture I’ll leave it with like, solid colors.

Not sure how many enemy types we’ll need. Thankfully we do need less of them with the new design, but that’s still gonna take some heavy work.

That’s it for today.

Sorry for not being able to do this daily as of late. When I go to bed after 10pm I tend to just go sleep and forget everything.

Still doing lots of work polishing with the main game flow. The UI is almost there and we just wrapped up a notification system, next is the player’s computer.

It’s gonna be something similar to Jill’s tablet in va11halla. Took me longer than expected to find an aesthetic I feel happy with. Worked on some environments too, but the ones needed for this particular segment of the game are ready to go.

The game does feel very much real now! aside from jank battles everything else looks and feels as it should.

While we polish battles at a later day I’ll go over the story sequences and see what can be improved and whatnot. Like I mentioned before this rework didn’t need a rewrite (thank god) but it does need less words, so I gotta adapt what we have.

That’s way later though. For now we’ll work on that PC, then an extra tool for timeline. Once that’s good THEN we polish battles.

Lots of work coming but now that everything is set in stone after so long we can move with a rocket strapped to our backs to the finish line. Let’s fucking go!

I completely forgot to update the log but it’s been due to really good work being done so far.

All the past several days have been spent on environment work, polishing the ui, giving it sound, making fancier transitions, integrating the overworld map, polishing cutscenes… it’s a lot of shit! of the good kind, that is.

Our goal at the moment is to make everything that’s already tested as pretty as possible, then newprogrammer goes back to the combat while I work on the story beats. I don’t wanna get ahead of myself but I have a mental estimate on how much time it’s gonna take to complete the whole game. Won’t reveal it, but boy is that encouraging. Game feels more real than ever.

It helps that the current scope is not aiming for a particularly long title. Replayable perhaps, but at our current size we can’t aim at a huge sprawling-ass action rpg. Expect a very nice story.

Here’s a funny shot from one of the cutscenes. I wonder how much this one will change between now and release.

Spent the past days working on a rather large environment and it came out pretty good. Actually quite proud of it!

It’s not done yet, but the mood is there.

Here’s a before and after:

The blocking was done months ago so it was very much just polishing. I need to go back to other finished maps at a later date cause I’ve been improving a lot and the disparity is starting to show.

Not gonna get carried away though. The game needs to ship.

Newprogrammer is hooking some UI stuff since I made the character menu again, except this time it’s actually just text and pictures, no fancy 3d previews or anything. Polishing it was gonna take too much time from us so it had to be simplified. After that he’s gonna integrate the map screen. All in all the goal is to have the game to look and feel as close as the final version as possible and build from there now that the design has been figured out.

It’s taken way, way longer than everyone expected but there were a lot of growing pains we didn’t account for. Stuff is finally coming on its own and I can’t wait to show it in full.

Another environment partially finished. Gonna replace a bunch of the placeholders at a later date but it’s looking really good already. I even hooked the BGM for good measure.

Had a call with newprogrammer and planned the next couple days since they’ll be rather important. In short, we’ll work towards a stable build to update over time. And to achieve this we’ll polish the game’s pacing and presentation; Think of fancier transitions, fully working menus, shops, locations, all that jazz. Even if the assets inside the game’s environments and characters aren’t final the build itself will aim at being as close as possible to what players will eventually experience.

Gonna be real fun to treat this build as a released game and update it over time.

The next couple days will be focused towards that goal and then we go back to battles and enemies.

Didn’t post for a whole week, I think?

Ludum Dare happened right after my last entry, then the rest of the following week I just made a bunch of environments and designs. Playtested the game too and it’s all looking very good. We gonna go ahead and polish the presentation (all UI stuff in place, fancy transitions, music, sound effects. All the enchilada) to have a stable build and… make the rest of the game I guess, lol.

Today I finished another couple environments, and did a draft of what I’d like the map to look like when choosing places to go. I made this to Parasite Eve’s soundtrack so the result was pretty baller. I like that the game has a solid enough identity now to the point I can just do these things real quick, plus knowing my way around Unity.

It’s not functional yet, this is just the usual set up I do so newprogrammer can provide the actual programming without having to ask me if it looks good : )

I was gonna have a call today with newprogrammer but fucking hell, I’m tired. Super tired. I’m using last bit of energy writing this.

This week’s gonna be fun!

After some more planning and light writing we’ve begun to play around with the currently finished chapter to make it align with the new design and loop. Can’t say it works for sure quite yet, for I haven’t playtested yet, but the iteration has been quick thanks to the tools.

I’m still getting used, honestly. Like, so much work suddenly disappeared that we don’t know what to do with so much freedom, which is where self-control and moderation must be applied. We’ll take all the time we saved taking these key decisions and invest them towards the combat, so that’s likely the aspect that will see the most tweaks in the future. After that we can decide what to add.

Meanwhile I can work at peace knowing how much I have to write for any given chapter. I was writing the game, as many people who check these logs know, as if it was a movie script. Then we adapt that into a playable level.

The problem is that writing this way makes it really hard to gauge how much dialogue is needed. Sure, I can write a whole chapter taking gameplay into account in the screenplay itself, but it eventually becomes very abstract and dialogue that works on paper comes out really cringey during gameplay.

What I’m doing now is taking the dialogue from those screenplays, then make an interactive flowchart using Twine. It allows me to visualize the game without prototyping and succesfully identify where writing is needed. This method wouldn’t work with our previous game loop (I’ll talk about that once the game ships).

This might sound like common sense to seasoned developers (thinking in flowcharts insead of traditional screenwriting), but this is the first time we make a game that has like full gameplay sections between the story, so a lot of this is new for everyone. Making games is hard, especially when 2D Visual Novels/narrative thingies are what I’m used to.

I’ve also been working on new UI elements and character design. Tomorrow I hope I can playtest stuff to start tweaking what needs to be tweaked, wrap up some much needed features and generally just make the game feel really good now that we don’t have to work on so much shit.

Most of the work was actually done last night while we were watching wrestling, and today was a continuation of it. We decided to lower the scope of the game so we can ship faster. Doesn’t mean a rewriting of anything; tools work just fine. What we’ll do is focus on combat way more, make normal enemies more about quality rather than quantity, tweak the gameplay loop so it’s actually a doable design and reduce the bulk of environment work by more than half.

The result will be a far more focused game. Still 6-7 chapters with the same story we already wrote, just designed differently to actually finish within this lifetime. And honestly we could just spend 2 more years realizing what we originally had in mind but fuck that noise. Let’s ship something better, sooner.

This week we’ll focus on prototyping this new design and if it goes well then we spear ahead with it. Good thing it’s a matter of moving existing nodes and chunks of gameplay around instead of starting from scratch, lol.