More writing work. I’m going surprisingly fast with this chapter, though this one does have less dialogue than the other one by virtue of having more gameplay bits. Pretty excited to see where it leads since i already had to change one ending because the characters evolved in a way i wasn’t expecting. Lovely stuff all around.
Category: progress
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normal hours yay
dunno if it’s a fluke but i woke up at semi-normal times (5 am or something like that) and worked just fine on the new script. It’s chapter 4 and since i already had it well-planned i’m going at a rather speedy pace and managed to write around 20 pages of it. I also sent the previous draft to a couple friends who are giving me some valuable-ass feedback so there’s that.
Newprogrammer is fixing some nasty bugs i found during testing but one remains mega obtuse to replicate. In essence, the player shoots and doesn’t hit the enemy even if the trayectory is clear, and then proceeds to shoot a couple more times to varying degrees of success even if there are no more attacks left in the queue.
Hopefully it shows up again next time i fire it up to find out what’s causing it.
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april 9
went over the script and made some needed adjustments after the team gave me feedback. So far it’s been received VERY well, even though i’m still hella insecure about it cause it’s my first time working on something of this magnitude. It’s not that the game is huge, but rather that it has more moving parts compared to a vn with just people chatting. The comments so far have been very encouraging and gives me confidence to jump to the next script. While the one i finished is still in draft stage, I seldom make the tweaks in the scripts since i prefer to keep notes and then do it inside the game. This is so i don’t feel like i’ve been staring at the same text document for ages and get to see if the changes work right away.
for project X i finished the character design i wanted to work on and turned out really good. I wasn’t expecting the direction i took with it, but i’m also not complaining. At all! next step is to make it a sprite if the team loves her as much as me.
Since my schedule has been a bit all over the place i think i can keep working in bursts over the weekend. Let’s see how that goes.
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april 7th
alright, script for chapter 3 is done, fucking finally and i really like how it turned out. the team is going over the contents and i’ll get to fixing once they give me that delicious feedback. Only one more place is needed when it comes to modeling but that’s fine. Now i have to review a bunch of fixes newprogrammer did over the week that he posted in the trello board. Now if you guys excuse me i have some empanadas waiting for me, i’m hungry.
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april 4th, 5th and 6th
Lots of work done even if i’m not timely updating the blog. My sleep schedule is a mess and I forget to write when it’s really late.
script for chapter 3 is done, i just have to extend what i have of the ending and send it to the team for feedback. I’m aware of a bunch of flaws but it’s nothing i can’t fix, plus they always have a bunch of ideas in can incorporate for better effect. Faceset for a third character in project X is done and now i have to design the final main one and get to the thing i wanted to do last week with the backgrounds. Newprogrammer has been chipping away at bugs and also completed a couple features i asked, like the debug thingie. It’s my hope we can work on the game’s levels again really soon when i’m done with the words.
it’s crazy how much the last stretch of februrary and march sidetracked me completely. I went from sleeping really well to whatever the hell i’m doing now. I’m still not crunching and get a lotta work done everyday, but it doesn’t feel as consistent as when i was working a 9 to 5 program. I need to make adjustments pronto!
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april 1st
almost done with the script, if everything goes well the first draft will be ready tomorrow since i only have to extend a few scenes and write the ending. been a longer journey than expected… as you guys know my mood for work hasn’t been the best, but i’m determined to push forward at a pace where i can do it safely until i can go full gear again. I’m really excited with how things are turning out. Slow but steady wins the race.
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march 30 and 31
Went back to writing and things are going very well, i was able to go back to some of the earlier bits and change around some parts that didn’t make much sense anymore or were redundant, but it’s gonna be an interesting experiment to see how much of this is gonna make it into the game since i’m looking at a lot of dialogue, and if possible i would like a ratio of gameplay to story to skew in favor of gameplay. What I want to say is that once i start putting this one together i’ll have a better idea of how much dialogue i need to write for future chapters.
newprogrammer is feeling better after new medication and a couple visits to the doctor and he’s been fixing more bugs with enemy behaviors that i need to playtest tomorrow. A couple tasks arose, such as a scene selection menu inside the game to better debug scenarios and a cleaner, more generic character controller without battle logic for downtimes. Maybe this could lead to a clean overall exploration (code-wise).
Gonna keep writing and then start new portraits for project X. I’m close to having all characters done so i can focus on backgrounds and cg’s.
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march 26
couldn’t do much yesterday due to irl stuff, but today i did manage to finish most portraits for a character in project X, next is some more ui stuff and jump to the third character, hopefully i can do that one faster. I’ve also been playtesting more project D stuff, but newprogrammer is gonna take a small break since he’s got his own health issues now. Nothing big, but he could use some big energy, dragon ball style. Good news is that the problems i found with the enemy creator have been fixed and at this point i really should finish the script for chapter 3 cause that’s getting silly, lol.
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march 23 and 24
big progress done with the enemy tools, they are now a breeze to make after some extensive test and quite a disaster that happened when i made a new one and the previous one went berserk…. because i accidentally moved the model far from the prefab center, and i had no idea until after newprogrammer had to figure out why it was freaking out. Sorry!!
so work has been mostly playtesting and stress the tools as much as i can, plus work on the secret project not related to games that’s almost there, just gotta test the final bits and then go ham with the rest. I feel a lot of people will appreciate this move and i’m very excited about it.
tomorrow i should finish the work on the portraits i was working on in project x, as well as resume writing what’s left of chapter 3 since i’ve been neglecting it.
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march 10 and 12
No report from yesterday since i did jackshit. Well, at least related to current projects. Thing is, i’m going through that phase of mine where I wanna do something to release some ideas that have been simmering for a long time and can’t include in on-going work, so naturally i become rather unmotivated and get hella sidetracked. It’s really bad for you guys since a lost day of work is an extra day of waiting (for whoever’s left out there that’s hyped for our stuff), but good for my wellbeing since it gets my creative juice flowing and makes me learn things that i can apply to the big meal. I mentioned before i might take a couple weeks to indulge myself into a completely alien thing and i have no idea when that might be, just know that it’s close. Plus ludum dare is in like two months i think, that’s another chance to do new stuff.
anyway, on the 10th all i did was write and i’m getting closer and closer to the finish line. I was intending to finish everything today but like i mentioned i got mega sidetracked. I write like one or two scenes per day, but now i gotta go back and tweak for some inconsistencies, better foreshadow cool stuff, and retroactively change some things due to shit i made up along the way. The results so far have been really good despite me being really slow at it, but as long as i do a hefty chunk everyday it’s gonna be alright. Today I mostly helped newprogrammer to plan out the behavior of the enemies by tweaking animator controllers and give him a rough approximation of how they should fight in battle, with properly blended animations and all that. It’s a rather simple job but at the same time quite time consuming since i have to make sure it’s all readable and looks good in motion. We also brainstormed a lot to fix the aforementioned inconsistency issues and came to some really good conclusions that i’ll be writing down once i go back to work.
Not gonna lie it’s been a rough two weeks now, motivation has a sinusoid shape going up and down, up and down in really annoying fashion. I shouldn’t stress too much but you gotta be in my shoes here. It’s been almost half a decade since va11halla was released, and I hate that because of situations out of my control we had to delay the game we planned to launch in 2020. I’ve always wanted to release a commercial game every 2 or 3 years, have many cool new IP by the time we turned 10 to keep a healthy momentum, now I’m all worried there won’t be anyone there for us when we release all we have in the oven. It might be a silly thought, but it kinda eats me alive everyday. No option but to chin up and keep working even if there’s nobody waiting for us; surely they’ll come back once they hear sukeban games made a badass game once again.