More writing work, and a surprising amount of revelations about game writing in general came up.
You see, in my free time I’ve been writing screenplays for films I’d like to make if that opportunity ever arises. So when I change over to game writing and resort to gameplay elements for characterization or set ups (think of Jill buying things to focus, or reading Augmented Eye to get small context on some characters), that’s where I realize the true power of video games as an art form. Things you can only transmit through visuals or dialogue in movies can be completely replaced by game mechanics if you know what you’re doing. Now, I already knew this! But going from a weekend writing a movie screenplay to game writing today made all of it the more obvious, and is subsequently making me integrate more game aspects with characterization and other aspects of the story.
I think newprogrammer is almost done with the current tasks of cleaning up and refactoring the battle system. Goal this week is to have all of that going so we can start the rest of the flow tools.
More writing at the park, by far my favorite activity now. Tho I wonder when the novelty will wear off. I think I’ll have to look for ways to spice up my way of doing things every so often in order to keep momentum when I need it, since it crashes down quite aggressively when I get bored of it.
For now though, it’s really cool! I like to write things with a pen since I can’t erase, so I have to think twice before writing a line of dialogue. Because of this I now act the lines out as if I was in a movie (I would already do this, but it was always after I wrote things down), and then I put the words on paper. The result is so far quite good, tho it doesn’t help structure that much; It’s my weak point.
Finally done with the migration and set up for project D (the tasks I mentioned yesterday, plus a couple new ones that arised today) and the game is looking better than ever. Next is to keep myself writing while newprogrammer wraps up the rest. There’s possibly something left for me to do but I’ll remember sooner or later.
Finished tweaking the last batch of player animations among other tasks, including new props and new vfx for grenade range. It felt quite light today, mostly by the fact I went out for longer than usual to do writing outside the confines of my apartment and computer. Just me, alone in the park writing my heart out on paper listening to cool music (the Lethal Weapon soundtrack this time). As it turns out I was able to concentrate big time, so I might start writing on paper more often. Preferably while outdoors.
Said writing wasn’t for project D though 🙂
Tomorrow I’ll probably finish tweaking the second humanoid enemy with the new proportions like I mentioned yesterday (couldn’t squeeze time for it), and look into a cleaner main menu using render textures (there’s a lot of camera conflict when I open it).
More animation work, this time to get enemies up to speed and polished for the battle rework. As expected this was a bit more fun than the player but also had to tweak more clips than usual.
Took the chance to give them more character, like having them point their guns sideways and tweak the topology since their legs were too short and looked super goofy in motion. All in all these changes made them a lot more menacing and a perfect template for future humanoid enemies.
Added trails as well using an asset I bought that I’ll disclose only if it doesn’t fuck everything up.
With this done I only have to do some minor modeling and particle work tomorrow, and update the other enemy model so it has correct proportions like this one.
By the way, instead of writing down everything single task you have pending… try instead writing down what you wanna do tomorrow when you’re done for the day. I found myself less overwhelmed and working more consistently that way. Pretty cool!
All core animations for battles and exploration are done, now I gotta do the same for humanoid enemies. That one’s gonna be trickier but a bit more fun that what I did with the player. Tasks include extending anticipation, changing angles, adding a trail to melee weapons so they can be read better and migrate a bunch of assets (like throwing grenades).
Also on the list: Ladders. I have no idea how to get those right but it’s what we settled on the exploration bits. The basics are: walking, climbing ladders and pushing boxes. Shouldn’t be anything out of this world.
Current plan is to finish migration this week and then follow up with the flow tools.
Grind goes on as always and I’ve been keeping myself busy with a lot of animation work (in large part adjusting stuff from zero since I did it quite shoddily in the previous iteration of the project). I’m almost done though, just need to go over the non-root motion stuff and come to a decision on which one we want for the finalized controls. There’s arguments in favor and against using root motion for movement but at the end it will come down to both testing and ease of use during development.
Also had a call with newprogrammer to go over the final gameplay modules and features. In the past year we’ve been experimenting a lot; saw a lot of failure and a lot of success, but it’s time we buckle down and choose what’s gonna make the cut. Things are looking up! Now it comes down to how we want the game loop to be handled from a tools standpoint. At the start I didn’t wanna make a game with a traditional loop but I’ve realized that at least for this one it’s something we can’t live without. What we got right now then is a hub-ish design; sorta kinda like Astral Chain if you’ve played that. This was always the plan, but as I wrote I realized I wasn’t treating it as such plus our tools weren’t up to speed. For example, how will the tools manage as the game goes along?: Change NPC dialogue, available NPC’s upon entering a map, available places to go, items available at stores, which player data will be carried accross chapters? and so on. After we are done refactoring and cleaning up what we have pending we’ll plan the solutions for the aforementioned problems on paper before writing a line of code. Once a consensus is reached I can go back to writing the rest of the chapters taking these final design choices into account, hopefully finish before newprogrammer is done with said final tools and then we build the game (this time for real, we’ve had like two or three false starts if this blog is anything to go by).
I realize that a lot of this should have been done before a single asset was made, but we are still amateurs and this is our first action-ish game; one that’s also in 3D. Thankfully we have the resources to take as much time as possible to get it right, tho I’m still a madman who wants to ship this year.
Last but not least, Project X just suffered a major setback and it’s possible we might have to ice it until the stars align. Won’t go much into detail but let’s hope that’s not the case. It’s a huge morale blow for me because I like to work on several games at the same time for mental health reasons. When a project becomes overwhelming the smaller one becomes a comfort game… and X was just that for me. It was in incredibly capable hands and I was mostly drawing /giving light direction (like I said, it was in capable hands).
I’m crazy, man. I love making games and I make games to relax. How does that even work?
Time to bounce. Here are some screenies showcasing the new shader for characters and equippable items. I love it.
More boring progress since we are still setting up a buncha stuff in the migration to the blank project. There’s a few things i wanna do over such as the controls and start using rootmotion for movement but it’s tricky. There’s also new unity tech (new to me anyway) that i wasn’t aware of such as the new input system and animation rigging and so far the results are great! but i doubt i’ll be using animation rigging for gameplay. I think it’s better suited for cutscenes and dialogues cause tweeining works better for transformations mid gameplay.
Newprogrammer also refactored a number of scripts and now some UI stuff that was up to 500 lines of code are now 50 so that’s pretty cool.
tomorrow i’ll keep tweaking more animations and possibly resume writing the chapter i’ve been working on.
Started work on a new script and it’s going smooth so far. I believe I’ve found the sweet spot between words and gameplay which is why any future ones might be done a bit faster, and i’ll have to trim the one i did first quite a bit. Maybe I should move some events that happen there and feature them elsewhere since there’s A LOT of dialogue . It’s gonna be interesting to balance a few things i’ve found along the way, namely see which aspects are going to be trimmed, scrapped or changed to favor the other. It’s not like the script and the gameplay loop are fighting for supremacy; it’s that they work in a very intertwined way right now it’s fun to think about that dynamic. Writing and gameplay working together and making compromises. Kinda like a marriage.
Tomorrow is ludum dare, and as usual i’ll give my best to deliver a fun, experimental game even if i got no clue right now on what to do. I had like a million ideas and they all vanished overnight or were too ambitious.
You know what my favorite thing in game development is? Wasting a whole day troubleshooting something. With favorite i meant less favorite.
The thing is that so far two off-the-shelf shaders have been giving me a lotta static. There’s the popular psxeffects or whatever it’s called that shits the bed quite bigly for mysterious reasons, then there’s flatkit that outright breaks unity for some reason. And look, i’m not gonna blame the devs, it could very well be our fault, but one thing is certain and that thing is… they gotta go! so i’m now not using any ps1 tricks or any of that stuff, not for the time being anyway. I could rollback any moment now because it’s not that hard to switch between visual styles outside color tweaks, but right now i wanna focus on a workflow that’s not going to betray me while we work on the meat and potatoes. So, for the environments i’ll just be using the bakery standard shader for better results with the precalculated lighting and realToon for the characters.
The results so far are pretty great.
I made a quick normal map for her textures just to check how it looks. Gotta adjust some bits here and there but i dig it.
A couple folks mentioned this is now looking like a psp game but frankly i don’t think i’m targetting a strict look from any console or era, i’m just doing (as always) what i think works best with the story that i want to tell, and for cyberpunk the game must look crusty as hell, be 3d or 2d. It’s gotta look dirty or it doesn’t feel cyberpunk for me.
Anyway, aside from these visual tweaks and the set up for the blank project we are using now i’ve also been knee deep adjusting some lore details before diving into the next chapter’s script. I’m debating whether i should do chapter 2 or 5 since they both have interesting challenges i’d like to tackle but i’ll see tomorrow.
I wish we could go at the same pace as late last year. Maybe we are and we just don’t know but so far it feels like we are dragging our feet super hard. I did finish two whole-ass scripts though, that’s a massive amount of work but my brain probably registers it as nothing cuz i’m always sitting and writing on the computer at any given time.
Chapter 4’s first draft is complete. Took less time due to having this one planned rather well and it having more gameplay meant writing less dialogue but it still came out pretty good. I need to develop some things i left hanging and do a consistency pass now that i’m finding out what the game is about (don’t ask).
Newprogrammer and I decided to migrate to another version of unity from a clean project since we basically lost control of what’s fucking up the game in mysterious ways, so we’ll be rewriting and carefully migrate scripts. Only the ones we use and are absolutely vital. Dunno how long this is gonna take but i’m not worried, since I have to write 4 other chapters. My goal is to complete the game’s story by the time the migration is complete and fully functional. I’ll be adding that to my daily tasks though, since I gotta migrate a bunch of things myself and set things up in a clearner way. I might do away with the ps1 stuff but i’m still undecided on that front. I want the game to look retro and pixel-y but certain things with the ps1 workflow is massively fucking me up (transitions break, the post processing is funky, and a plethora of etc.), and it’s making me think that kinda style doesn’t work for a large project but who knows, maybe we are that incompetent.
