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.

More writing work. I feel like I’m going slow but at the same time at an acceptable rate? I really don’t wanna rush my dialogue, but I wanna write MORE per day. It’s important to keep myself clear minded and just make everything flow, so as long as I do a good chunk everytday it’s gonna be alright. Moreover, I’m already halfway through with three more playable areas to write for, and I’m guessing they won’t be as word-heavy as the first half that needs to set up a bunch of things. I’ll find out once I get there.

In other news, I might take a week at some point this month to make a complete game and release some pent up creative feelies and learn some stuff I’ve been curious about. It’s only an idea for now, might just wait for Ludum Dare but I’m not sure if what I have in mind can be done in 3 days.

another day of writing. i decided to complete all the dialogues for the chapter before proceeding to make the cutscenes (what we wrote down was the plan for each playable level, not the detailed dialogue bits). I was gonna do just the intro and then write stuff as i went along for no particular reason, but i realized that i might as well just do the whole thing and then film the stuff in order to get a better feel for every character.

writing for games is really weird, man, since there’s gameplay in between i tend to get confused about the length of the dialogues. Moreover, i might have stumbled upon a technical bottleneck with the way i do normal conversation cutscenes, so it probably requires a small rework and integrate some sort of scripting mixed in with some timeline shenanigans.

all in all pretty comfy, i managed my stress pretty well and did some exercise every hour to not sit for long periods of time. Shaking off the crunch habits has been difficult but i’ve been mostly crunch-free since november or something, and i’m pretty proud of that! i just need to keep improving.

not a whole lot to report since all i did was write dialogue so i can keep making cutscenes tomorrow. the one i was working on kinda doesn’t fit anymore since i don’t have a good pipeline for detailed traversal for cutscene models, so i’ve decided to make a lot of these cutscenes playable even if they aren’t going to feature any battles or deep exploration. I think it’s for the better, makes for a more unique experience. Yay for creative solutions to dumb limitations.

i also bought a smart watch thingie so i can keep track of my stress levels since i’m not feeling good again and i feel it’s the same thing i had last year with the anxiety stuff, so imma try to control that while i get stuff done. Call it a long term investment since controlling my health means faster and better work.

Newprogrammer finished a rudimentary enemy editor and next in the list is a weapon editor, with both in place i’ll be able to churn models like crazy and integrate them fast into the game.

Small reminder to myself: request a script for character movement that’s just character movement so it can be used during interactive cutscenes.

mostly productive day making a new environment that didn’t need much planning since it’s not playable, and the cutscene that takes place in there. It looks really funny using only temporary assets, but it makes me think about the viability of cutscenes as i’m doing them right now. I’d like to get one of those mocap suits to do em since i focus on rather mundane sequences, but we’ll see what the future holds for us. Newprogrammer made a breakthrough in the work he was doing so things are going rather smooth again.

See you all monday!

Spent the whole day tweaking and finishing how scenes and cutscenes are loading, which is something we completely forgot about. So let’s say there’s a cutscene and then we wanna load another scene that starts another cutscene, it’s that kinda problems we had no idea about starting out, but we finally came to a good solution that basically splits the elements of a cutscene in its own scene, then we load that along with the environment it takes place in. Tomorrow i should probably finish chapter selection to hook each button with their respective intros, and start doing some cutscenes with the new workflow. Multi scene editing is very comfy, but not gonna lie, it kinda made everything a mess since we knew shit about that, good thing to take into account for future games. Motivation is still shaky but i still get work done, even if small.