yesterday was one shit of a day, i don’t wanna talk about that.

so, third day of writing and made some more progress, also began doing some extra menus that were missing and came up again in the plans, and it was pretty fun, i even had to do some illustration which i do not get to do a lot of these days, especially not for UI stuff. Tomorrow i’ll finish another menu which will likely involve more drawings so it can look amazing, and hopefully review a final plan for the chapter’s story content and progression. I need to be patient whenever we hit a similar planning phase, i hate planning because my brain feels i’m not doing much but it’s a necessary evil. At least the fact we are planning means we got experienced enough to have a good idea of the amount of work required to execute what’s on paper. Maybe i’ll enjoy planning now because of that!

second day of writing the script, mostly working on the rough of each event, how they connect and how they play. Games of this kind i’ve found work a lot like I think a movie works, except you have to account for a bunch of interactive variables and taking a hard look at everything to see which parts work better as a game and as a cutscene. It’s fun all around, but i’d be lying if i said i wasn’t mostly looking at the ceiling and generally dicking around while i was thinking of each event and piece of dialogue. I even began reading some interesting books that got a bunch of ideas flowing, but not in the direction i was expecting (a lot of what i came up with ended up being added to the background lore instead of you know, the blocking of each scene and sequence of the chapter in question)

It’s been a bit hard convincing myself that this is actual work compared to the shit i have to work on everyday inside the engine, but that’s also part of the learning process i suppose. Not everything has to be eternal suffering, sometimes work IS a bunch of passive brainstorming and typing shit in a word processor.

And to those wondering why we working on the script a year into the game’s development, remember that this time we are making a game first, one that was born out of ideas and an aesthetic vision, themes. We began with the game parts, made them look good, scrapped a bunch of things, polished others, now we have to make them have sense. We THOUGHT they were making sense as we were finishing this map, but after going through it at the start of the year i’ve realized just how much was being made as we went, not in a cool va11halla way where that kinda stuff is what makes the script so fun (in narrative games like that, i feel improvisation is key), but rather in a “oh fuck we made a bunch of cool shit but nothing makes sense when put together”

it’s frankly a tad difficult to explain, but hey, we are still amateurs at this, especially in 3d and pretty much everything we are doing here, for the next game we’ll be seasoned veterans and hopefully stuff will get made faster.

not a whole lotta hard progress since we spent most of the day playtesting and discussing/planning our next steps. We are in the best possible spot right now where our tools work just fine and the level design process has been ironed out, we just don’t have a whole lot of direction outside of the rough drafts that gave birth to this world and project, and it’s about time we began detailing these. Newprogammer and I will be in the process of mostly writing for the next couple days and then we’ll finish what’s left of the progression system. Really exciting stuff, even if it doesn’t make for the most interesting of log entries.

so the process of reskinning the same base model actually works and it’s pretty fast depending on what i want to do, so that’s really cool! means i can just churn out basic enemies whenever we need a new one without much drama.

made some new ui elements for the menu, namely a cool-looking tooltip and we added some basic qol improvements. Once we code that tooltip the menu will be ready, maybe, you know how it goes.

the rest of the day i spent it playtesting, apparently newprogrammer fixed the battle stuff as i actually played half the level and it all worked fine, i just died because i’m kind of a dumbass and we still don’t have checkpoints. Got some new models from the 3d team and they all look great except for one of em that has funky textures, so delivering that feedback took time from the day too.

i wanna integrate the new enemy models this monday, along with finally deciding what to do with this map, it’s all falling apart bros…! at least in my head.

finished the model i was working on yesterday, which is kind of a miracle? it went so smoothly. I began with a drawing of i wanted it to look, then the geometry, texturing, rigging, and i didn’t run into any major issues except googling why blender wasn’t automatically assigning bone weight to the character’s head, turns out i was running into some scaling issues. Automatic weights worked on the first try too, so i didn’t have to tweak anything, kind of insane really.

the results are pretty cool and i can see a massive improvement in the way i do textures.

Most of my day went into finishing this dude, tomorrow i should grab this base model and do another similar enemy but with different hair, textures and accesories. IN THEORY this should lead to rapid enemy humanoids, but i’ll find out in due time.

tested newprogrammer’s commits and found that battles still have issues to finish, and i’m wondering if we should rethink how that flow is made cause it’s been a torn for a while now. He says it’s not that big of a deal because unity does in fact show what’s wrong. Menu is also abit raw but almost there, just needs some extra polishing for human usage, such as tooltips and highlight active tabs.

After a rather long holiday (felt forever for me, dunno why as it wasn’t even bad), i’m back to action and ohhh boy, do i have a bad feeling of the good kind…

What i mean to say is that i’m not very happy with the current level design and i’m thinking really hard of tossing everything again and begin from scratch using the knowledge i gained around the end of the year. Note that this kind of environments aren’t that hard to map in ps1 fidelity, and the props, systems and set pieces are already made, it’s just that this map doesn’t make any fucking sense and i’m basically going insane. I’m now looking at this more as a sandbox level for testing rather than a finished one.

That said, I’m not gonna waste time redoing stuff right now as we need to keep spearing ahead, THEN if there’s time, i’ll change it, so no worries about reading more blogs about me being in a constant state of “almost done with this map”

Aside from these musings i began the day doing the interface for a piece of side content we’ll properly code later when we finish more pressing matters, and spent the rest of the day doing concept art and blocking the topology for a model i’ll be using as a sort of humanoid template for generic enemies. The plan is making enough parts and unwrap the model in such a way that i just have to change textures, hair and weapons to have completely different dudes to kill or go non lethal on their asses, without spending a fuckload of money outsourcing or precious time grinding.

There are some things that need some serious planning to avoid bloating the shit out of the project, putting that here as a reminder. Namely how long we want it to be and the structure of the main story so we can establish once and for all how levels will load, what menus will be used for for chapter selection… it’s a lotta stuff i didn’t consider early on, but better late than never. Right now my mind is set on a structure similar to that of Killer7 where you chose a target and the chapter begins, but it’s currently at odds with some stuff we wanna include.

Frankly speaking, i’m a bit scared! but it’s nothing i can’t solve.

so this is technically my last work day of the year, i’ll still be on the lookout for general company stuff but from tomorrow it’s vacation time. I want to do like a longer post looking back at the past 12 months of non stop hustle to get this project going, but that’s gonna be once i have my ideas sorted out. I can safely say right now that it was all pretty good, lots of learning, getting the feel that we could have been here way earlier had we known what we were doing but hey, you learn by actually doing shit, not endlessly planning… you plan when you know your shit, it’s called pre-production and pros know about that.

but anyway, it was all good stuff, save for health scares and constant despair due to being still rather new to 3d development what we did here is nothing short of fantastic, and i look forward to 2021 since it’s gonna be the year where we focus solely on game content, now that our tool chain and features are locked in.

today i wanted to test the whole level but i rather leave this to january kiririn fifty one cause it’s gonna be worse if we stop working knowing the whole thing can’t be completed (with the temptation to keep working), so it’s better to just wrap up our current tasks and get some rest. What I did do however is model and texture a couple new props and link the new pieces of environments to the rest of the map and with the boss cutscenes, which all work properly save for one of the movies that was acting up god knows why. I hope this isn’t going to be a thing moving forward, cause i’m banking on timeline for a lot of shit.

newprogrammer finished the new character menu using a separate scene i made for all of it, and save for some funny bugs it looks and works great.

but yeah, good stuff, i’ll make sure to write down the wave of ideas i will come up with when i’m away from this.

Wasted the entire day troubleshooting unity shit that made the project completely unplayable and the version control didn’t want to do its hecking job, which drove me to the wall in anger. Fixed it by having newprogrammer send me a .zip with the whole project and then downloading my last commit.

it was some shit with bakery being unstable all over the place, likely because i updated my nvidia drivers without updating bakery itself, but anyway it’s solved.

I hope tomorrow i get to at least test the whole level with the character menu, cause it’s gonna be the last work day for the year.

so one more day of work before vacations and i can say that we did achieve our goals, though a bit less than i’d hoped. Still, we did a fuckton and i’m proud.

Another thing I’m proud of is my environment work.

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I’m really happy with how things are turning out and can’t wait to do more of these as we build the game.

newprogrammer said he was probably gonna work a half day tomorrow to wrap up the character menu so we just playtest this monday and call it there. Spearking of playtesting, i discovered a pair of happenings, like the boss attacking but not moving and battles not finishing (old issue that resurfaced with the new battle ui) but they don’t seem like big problems to worry about… all in due time.

See you all monday.

Newprogrammer is almost done with the new character menu and i worked all day on polishing the general look of the level and making it more cohesive, also a few new props. Been having some problems with bakery where at a certain amount of objects it just refuses to do its thing which is kinda worrying, might need to segment this into several scenes? need to look into it.