made a complete new cutscene sans a few missing assets i need to add later. It’s a pretty fucking good one honestly, despite its simplicity i’m very much vibing with how it turned out and can’t wait for people to play this. It took me a while mostly on the writing department of which i wanted to talk about a bit.

So, I’m not a writer, not a real one, i say this because the only way i can possibly come up with good writing is by doing everything on the spot. My process with this game is the following:

• i make a skeleton of things and beats i’d like to see, both gameplay and story/characters
• start some groundwork on the cutscene (set, cameras, characters, animations needed)
• THEN i write the actual dialogue, and depending on the dialogue i add more visuals that help what i’m trying to convey

the downside is that i can’t just work following a plan, the good part is that it’s all super fun and dynamic to do. The skeleton i talked about takes care of consistency and structure, the rest is very much free form.

Will it work? who knows, but i’m liking the results a lot.

tomorrow i’ll likely keep grinding cutscenes, while new programmer finishes the new character menu work, since he’s mostly done with the new battle ui integration.

gonna keep this one short cause i have a huge headache.

newprogrammer finished the interface revamp and is now fixing some bugs that arised from those changes, should be all good by tomorrow. On my end i’m done with the rough cut of the cutscene i was making yesterday and ran into a couple issues regarding animation clips and timeline where certain things will look different in preview and during playmode, which has me all kinds of worried… what if they also work differently when you build the game? scary shit.

anyway, time to get some rest.

my nephew is 16 years old, holy fucking shit.

wasted a bit of my morning not being able to play because the game broke again (expected, we are changing core systems), and unity decided to stop working too (the collab feature didn’t want to work), then after lunch i focused 100% on a important story cutscene, from writing to actually making it look nice inside the game. I’ve been getting increasingly effective at making these, but some problems still arised, such as not being able to change lookAt in cinemachine through the animation track (it was working before, not anymore), and a really specific animation clip completely breaking while the game is in slow motion, which is going to be super annoying to delve into and try to fix.

Tomorrow i’ll keep working on it, since this is the first big story movie of the game and needs lots of attention. Should get at least a rough cut of it, then start writing another.

more enemy grinding, this time two extra models i spent most of my day both modeling and texturing. these are going to be sent to be rigged and animated next week probably. Other than that I didn’t do much, it’s what happens when i do mostly artistic things and basically why i’ve been avoiding them as of late, since all it involves is… well, just working on one thing for an extended amount of time, which also doesn’t sound impressive for this devlog either. Next on the list is complete one more enemy type, and then integrate them once we get the animations, though there’s a big chance it won’t make the cut before going on vacations. We’ll see!

newprogrammer is still on the refactoring of the interface stuff and it looks promising so far. With this we avoided somewhat of a bad habit of ours, where we basically stop development whenever we have to revamp something, and never occured to us that we can in fact revamp systems and shit, but on the side without disturbing the actual game design; basically us the neardenthals would make the game unplayable for days, even weeks instead of making the improvements on parallel to what’s already there. So yeh, learning experiences…

as my vacactions approach all i’m thinking now is what kinda thing i’ll prototype over the holidays. I feel like experimenting like i did last year with photogrammetry environments.

i’m feeling alright health-wise, but i can feel my brain about to explode with the amount of shit i have to do, so i’m just doing my thing as always without worrying about the numbers and working on tasks as they come.

today i finished the remaining things for the battle interface and notifications etc. but you won’t see much difference since all i did was get very liberal with canvas usage, layout groups and arrange everything in a comprehensible way for new programmer to work the new code. Apparently is working out great as he just told me the way i did things made him get some clean-ass code right out of the gate.

also finished a new enemy model and i’m gonna do another one tomorrow, then another one… i basically have to grind a bunch of these so we can squeeze the game mechanics for what they are worth.

I’m getting increasingly excited about the future. The way everything is just coming into its own makes my imagination go bananas thinking of of what we can do with all of this knowledge. I know i’ve said this several times but it’s something i can’t get out of my head.

fixed the probe placement (scene was being super slow at the old number), playtested and fixed some missing signal emitters from cutscenes, did the loading screen and re-did the battle interface for the upcoming refactoring. playtested the psy bar integration and the boss battle and tweaked it some more. Newprogrammer fixed a bug in the psy bar and made it look prettier, added a death animation for one of the enemies with a new sequence too, and now the game feels pretty cohesive and good-looking, we just gotta do the refactoring i mentioned. One thing newprogrammer did that i thought was pretty cool is a “master key” that solves any puzzle regardless of key item, saves me a lot of time debugging stuff without assigning the items before i hit play or make item pickups.

Tomorrow aside from pending battle ui stuff from today, i’ll move on to some 3d modeling for new enemies and send them to be animated. I’m still feeling a bit overwhelmed since there’s a sudden number of shit to do coming outta nowhere, but i gotta power through this. I’m overall a bit bummed since the progress i make doesn’t feel huge due to how time consuming certain things are but it’s still progress.

again one of those days where i spent a bunch of time on a seemingly small task but given the lack of expertise it ends up swallowing a lot of my day. This time was getting used to this tool that places lightprobes automatically that was giving me some headaches, but if it works well i’ll give em’ a free shout out. So far it all looks great, it did place every lightprobe where it had to and frankly the game’s ps1-esque look is giving me the benefit of not needing to adjust every single probe by hand.

Also began the groundwork for a save system and controller support, also with some assets i got. Other than that, i made a game over timeline (once the death animation is put back in i’ll show it, looks hella badass), playtested and uncovered some… left over bugs from the puzzle tools (a feature we forgot to fully test, basically) that were fixed, integrated the PSY bar for psychic skills, and made other visual effects to telegraph enemy attacks easier. I should continue that one tomorrow with some of the special attacks. Playtested more of the boss battle and it’s just turning out great.

This week will probably be just grind on things we’ve been sleeping on, cause tomorrow i’ll have to do the loading screen, playtest the whole level to check everything is working, then finally redecorate a large chunk of it.

a bit of a disappointing day as i kept myself busy with the menu stuff and got stuck adjusting a single animation for far too long. Good news is that i might be somewhat done with it, and also made a new gun. Tomorrow i should focus on polishing some of the earlier rooms in the level so they are more consistent with the rest of the complex, or extra story cutscenes. There’s frankly a lot to do and it’s starting to feel a bit overwhelming, but it’s a matter of isolating each task and just do it, instead of thinking of what needs to be done.

Newprogrammer started working really late so not much progress on the boss battle, but he’s now integrating some leftovers of the battle ui and hopefully tomorrow we can work on the same hours as we’ve been doing for a long time now.

gonna finish a bit early today cause fridays kinda demolish me but also because i have to do some errands. good news is that i kept working on the new menus and shit, finished a ton of it and only one section remains, and it’s all looking great. taking more time than i expected but hey, games of this kind deserve well-made interfaces.

newprogrammer is still working on the boss while i help him playtesting it and it’s closer and closer to our vision. really great stuff overall and somehow an exciting battle despite the (currently) simple AI. Once we do like more phases and special behaviors it’s gonna be one for the ages.

see you all monday.

nice day, spent all working hours playtesting and doing the new UI stuff, including the title screen and character menu, which we already had but it’s simply not working for me and we have a disaster in our hands that needs to be changed. Newprogrammer spent all day working on the boss fight using a prefab and controller i set up yesterday and it already plays fantastic, next step is to polish each attack and then give it priorities, phases, and all the good stuff a boss fight should have. I’m really looking forward to it.