Been sleeping late, that’s why I write these at like 3-4am. I don’t work at these hours so no need to worry about crunch. I make a point to do everything I have to do before 8 or 9pm (I start late, too).

Did another camera set up and environment for the game. Tomorrow I have to look for some animations, and start laying out the last scene of the chapter, which is a fairly detailed “dungeon” type. That one’s gonna take days I think, but it’s alright. I’m feeling very confident with my level design skills now. Once everything is properly tested I can then start polishing with final geometry and textures, then write some more.

Newprogrammer is feeling better!

Another day another blocked out scene. Two more to go! (did I say two last time? Well, it was 3 at the end)

Newprogrammer got his 5G shot and has been feeling quite bad, so he’ll be outta action for the time being. He did say it’s entirely possible to finish this chapter this or next week.

Now, I don’t wanna be overly optimistic, but if we finish what we set out to do here then it would have taken approximately three weeks to draft it all. That’s having to code things on the fly, too.

What this means is that we’ll have a very good guess on how long each chapter will take super soon, and with that a better idea on a release schedule.

Now let’s hope this post gets published because my connection is super dying tonight.

More level design work. With the map I finished today there’s only 3 left. Two small and one fully explorable level. Dunno how far I will get tomorrow but that’s the work ahead.

Newprogrammer has been coding the side gig menus.

After this chapter is complete content-wise and implemented inside the game, the amount of bespoke code and environments should be reduced significantly. Pretty exciting.

Not a very good day. Got stuck in some font-related issues to test the localization, but I’m sure it happened because I didn’t take breaks. I did finish the side gig menu (just a variation of already existent menus), some particle effects needed for certain game mechanics, and a bit of graphic design for the title cards that show up between loading screens in certain ocassions.

I won’t waste my time on the font shit tomorrow to get more done. Eventually I’ll have to solve it but I’m mad it took most of my day just to fail at it.

Blocked out another scene. It’s a small one (like pretty much all scenes in this chapter) but it did force me to get creative with the way it’s done. It’s just two rooms and two hallways which I’ve done before plenty, but this time around it does feel like a real place. Hard to describe but I guess that’s the experience I’ve accumulated since development began showing thru.

Newprogrammer is polishing all kinds of things and implementing more dialogue. It looks as if it was taking a long time to do so, but he’s also fixing and building new code as he goes along depending on our needs so it’s fine. I’m very curious about how fast the other chapters can be made after this is all said an done.

Tomorrow I’ll work on some menus and a simple first person camera for a cool segment. If there’s time I’d like to write a bit.

Finished the set up for the boss character in this chapter and it took me longer than expected since I had a bit of trouble with her HUGE fuckin’ hair and the physics involved. The solution was easy, but I wasted time tryna doing it in Blender and ruining the heat maps of the model set up by the people who made it.

The problem was that the back of the hair was parented to the head, and i needed it parented to the spine. I blender this can be done easily, but the bone mapping or whatever that’s called gets messed up in the .fbx export process. The solution was really dumb but lovely. Basically just drag the bone in the unity hierarchy to the bone you want as a parent. That’s it. It worked like a charm.

I won’t show the results because I love her design and I rather show it in some trailer or something.

Newprogrammer implemented more dialogue and made a list of recurrent issues that gotta be ironed out in the tool.

Not a whole lot due to some personal thingies but still did the layout and set up for another scene and cleaned up the title screen. Newprogrammer had a couple buttons for New Game and Load Game in the most “programmer art” fashion you can think, so I drew a quick sketch and made the buttons consistent with the rest of the game.

The game’s logo goes in the middle, but since it’s not final and contains an also not-final title for the project I won’t show it until a formal reveal.

During the set up of the level I did encounter an unexpected problem.

It looks as if the model gets off-center over time, which is weird since it doesn’t occur with Reila’s model. We’ll have to check this out once the dialogue gets implemented in this scene.

Not sure if I’ll be able to make more levels tomorrow but we’ll see. I may have to redo the character menu since we are scrapping a bunch of features since there’s like, zero fuckin’ desire to do game balance. So a simplified gameplay is in order. Core stays the same, but we’ll proooobably not go with a skill tree. Perhaps a more DMC-esque upgrade shop?

Again, we’ll see!

Another two maps blocked out, and newprogrammer implemented some more dialogue. This time with cutscenes in between loading so that’s one less worry about the game’s flow. Things are really super fucking comfy right now and I couldn’t be happier. We’ll keep building this chapter and fix whatever comes up and I’ll keep polishing the visuals as we go.

Tomorrow more of the same. Newprogrammer I think has to build a tool for creating NPCs but I don’t remember if that’s already done.

Good shit!

Newprogrammer has been implementing dialogue while I make levels. Today I blocked out 2, complete with camera set ups and all. Tomorrow I will probably do the same if I don’t feel like writing. Pretty chill yet productive day. Tons of fun playing around with cinemachine.

We began working on Project D chapter 4, stuff’s going surprisingly well. Newprogrammer listed an amusing 27 things to add but it’s all very needed stuff we’ll use a lot across every chapter. Chief among them is a way to trigger cutscenes when going from one place to another. That shit happens a lot!

Felt nice to be back to making cutscenes, too. I also did some environment work. Gonna be an interesting next week for sure.