took it a tad easy today for i’m a bit blocked on how to proceed with one of the playable environments, needs lots of careful planning before i waste my time like in the previous map, so it’s been mostly brainstorming and drawing. Been also working new skills and logistics for the skill tree with newprogrammer so we can complete that in a timely manner before i can start working on file03’s content. For now i’ll try to relax over the weekend while i come up with ideas and then go all monday morning.
Category: progress
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january 28
project X: finished room permutations and tweaked the main interface, now i gotta do generic rooms. Need to be careful with my render workflow since i already had some mysterious color inconsistency, but since the floor is already made i can just take that into account for the next batch.
project D: did a bunch of new parts for a rather large scene that’s gonna be half playable, half cutscene so it needs props that actually work as a level. Pretty fun, I already had a solid idea of what i wanted and tomorrow i’ll sit down and properly sketch the level, need to find references for large basements. Newprogrammer has been knee deep all week integrating a bunch of new code to the UI I made weeks ago, some bugs arised but we’ll properly address them later. Gotta come up with fun skills and augments.
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january 27
Was able to start early, that means time to jump between projects. For Project X i finally came up with a rather funny way to churn backgrounds, but it took a bit of tweaking and i need to figure out the right workflow to keep consistency.
first i do a render in blender
then I draw on top and apply a dithering using a palette lookup.
It’s pretty fun, saves a lot of time, just gotta nail the right steps to produce many of them in a short time.
For project D i continued with the list of environments, this time a morgue scene that’s halfway done now, just need to do one more room with its props and textures. Had to put in some extra work with the waiting room for i wanted to visualize a particular style of “cinematography” before polishing further, pretty happy with the results.
That’s it for today.
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january 26
woke up a bit late today since i couldn’t sleep at all, something’s got me uneasy and it was really hard to relax and close my eyes.
Spent most of my hours working on the environments from the list while newprogrammer does the remaining features we thought were complete, overall just grinding stuff that’s already planned. Speaking of planning, been having some issues working on a morgue scene for i can’t find good reference on what a morgue needs in term of equipment, and i have no desire to visit a real one anytime soon to find out; it’s been tricky to research. On the bright side I finally started seeing the point of sketching stuff before modeling and texturing, it’s saving a lot of time since any iteration i make doesn’t involve doing the whole thing again. It’s what i’ve been saying all this time, planning is for people who already know the kinda work it entails to do X or Y task, now that i know the ins and outs of 3D modeling i can finally take my time to plan ahead.
Tomorrow i’ll likely start modeling the scene, providing i come up with a good layout on paper.
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january 25
Goood shit, began the week with high energies even if i have some uhh, personal worries. Last friday we made a list of everything we’ll need for File 03, and part of it were a number of environments that i have to make, 8 of them to be exact and almost half of them are recurrent places, like Reila’s house, the HQ (doing these again since a lot changed since), a morgue, shady alleways, bars, etc. some of them are unique, like one or two but if we finish the bonus mode then all environments will be reusable! gotta squeeze everything for what it’s worth.
But anyway, out of the 8 environments, I’ve already drafted and prototyped 2 in a pretty refreshing fashion since i actually drew what they were going to look like and then did my thing with blender and pro builder. The results look pretty natural (as expected from all the studies I’ve done when it comes to environments) and they shouldn’t take long. The ps1esque limitations are in place so i can go ham with scenes without going crazy. I want dense places to explore and this is the only way i can make all props and whatnot in quick fashion.
Tomorrow i’ll keep blocking out the rest just so we can move ahead to content, and will texture in parallel to that, just need to organize myself a bit better. Pretty fun day! These places are not huge spoilers so expect some before/after shots once i’m happy with the results.
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January 22
Not a lot of work yesterday since i had to attend some private matters and what little i did amounted to writing down some minor ideas and some sketches for one character that needs a redesign.
Today was a bit more busy, we just finalized the chapter scenario, from here on we gonna call it File 03; that’s right, we are gonna start by the third one so we can make the last and first chapters by the end of the schedule and use the learned experience for a good start and a good end. Anyway, file 03’s scenario is mostly done (we only need to clear up some of the dialogue that happens in the ending bits), made the list of locations, props, characters and other things i will need to make and outsource, it’s a fairly long chapter but despite that the amount of work is not that huge. We’ll begin this monday and then work on the rest of the scenarios in parallel. I recently finished the one for File 02, and currently in the middle of File 05. Right now we are planning for roughly 8 chapters of variable length. It’s a big game, but still with a considerable set of constraints to make it all viable.
Monday we’ll also need to wrap up some of the basic features we’ll need from now on, namely checkpoints, saves, skill tree, augments menu (more like uncomment that feature, lol), asyncronic loading (for levels that have more than one scene), and multi scene editing.
Shit got real fellas!
Here’s a Reila sketch I made last night cause i couldn’t sleep.
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january 20
pretty relaxed day just writing with newprogrammer, only one event is left to be outlined but chapter’s already neatly blocked out for the most part, and any change will be small and made on the fly during production. Gonna draw some concept art for it once it’s done. Been also outlining the rest of the episodes since we already had a very solid idea on how they should play out. Chapter 3 (the one we are working on right now) was made very haphazardly using some cool yet vague ideas, so it was complicated to get it right.
Took a bit to sketch out an inventory ui for project X too so I once again was able to work on two projects in one day. Very nice.
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january 19
another day of good work, this time i managed to cram project x stuff which is on track once again after clarifying some confusions about how exploration works and preemptively finished some much needed ui elements.
aside from that i got my hands dirty once again in character design for a new character in the project D cast. Dunno if i mentioned this before, but for a lot of these designs i tend to do the face and hair, maybe some accesories and then merenge completes the design with a cool outfit, it’s been working out very well so far.
last but not least, i somehow wrote more of the game’s outline and tomorrow i’ll start detailing each chapter so our writer can help out figuring out the real meat. I’m glad that i’ve been able to write everything down so i don’t have to constantly pull things out of my brain on the fly.
Very productive, even if i still can’t go back to engine stuff quite yet.
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january 18
my hands hurt from typing, both in a document and on telegram just going back and forth with newprogrammer over the game’s details. I had to write a bunch of shit that was in our heads so our actual writer can go over it and then help with the rest of the outlines. The chapter we were planning last week got an overhaul and is almost done as a result, hopefully tomorrow it will be ready to go. Also drew a bunch of concept art for enemies in the current plan.
It’s all shit that’s supposed to be done in pre production but as i’ve said before, you gotta learn how to do the shit first before you can plan anything, otherwise you end up with a fat fucking document with an unfeasible scope.
The grind continues tomorrow, can’t wait to go back to environments and just putting the game together, but it’s gotta wait a bit more.
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january 15
another day reviewing a script that’s getting dangerously chonk, very thick. Once we give it a polish pass we’ll determine if it needs to be condensed but for now we have to detail it quite a bit. We are almost there though, made big progress the past 2 days.
On the remaining menus, i’m mostly done with what i set out to do and just needs to be coded now but that will be done once we go back to the nitty gritty of work inside the engine.
Here’s hoping next week we’ll finalize planning. Probably not the case but it’d be cool if stage planning would take 1 or 2 weeks, then the levels another 2 weeks. Right now newprogrammer is doing a big chunk of the current level, so i’ll do the others in tandem just so we have a base by the time we move on to those.