finished camera set up for most rooms along with the waypoints, arranged some props, made new rooms, and a metric ton of new icons for skills, accesories, items, keys, buffs, debuffs, as well as particle effects for the latter, and some other vfx for special bullets and impacts. I think tomorrow we will integrate the ui elements i did the other day, like the PSY bar and the altered states icons/counters, along with polishing the new accesories for the rifle – we made a grenade launcher for it in order to refactor and plan out future enhancements and make it all comfy.

tomorrow i’ll go back to drawing and touch up some of the concepts merenge made, along with finishing extra details for one of the characters and then send them for modeling. I also need to tweak a new animation for the grenade launcher.

Only two more set pieces + the boss fight and this level would be content complete.

now to shower, get nice food and play yakuza!

did a bunch of UI work for altered states, new icons for skills and actions, plus the long delayed character design on one of the remaining bosses (this took me most of the day). I’m not quite done yet but we are pretty happy with the results so far.

newprogrammer has been doing a deep refactoring of the skill system so we can add more later without much work. It’s one of the earliest things we ever did so naturally a bunch of code was unnecessary.

in other news i bought yakuza like a dragon so i’m sorry if this update is hastily written cause i wanna go back to it before i sleep.

lots of progress doing the usual tweaks and adjustments to the level so the doors and cameras work as intended. I mention this a lot, so it’s worth noting that this takes me a fair amount of time because the camera angles change depending of the room, so whenever i have to set up doors i also have to make sure they are triggering cameras and working properly.

also finished the room for the final boss fight of this chapter and it’s looking really cool. newprogrammer is implementing new skills for the player so we can make sure it’s comfy to add more later.

after all tweaks and stuff are done, we’d be two more setpieces away from finishing this one without counting a more through polishing of every aspect.

tomorrow i need to stop delaying the character design for a couple bosses. i already got some good ideas so that’s half the battle, now to actually draw.

i also need to draw more icons for the actions.

finished every section except the boss room, so monday i can either spend the whole day doing that room, or finish that one partially and focus on the story cutscenes while newprogrammer does the enemy integration. As i’ve stated before, being done or finished with parts of the map does not mean i stop working on them, they are merely textured, connected and lit close to the final vision, but are still lacking things like props, more texture variations, decals, stuff like that. The thing is that for me atmosphere is so important to the experience i need at least a preview of it. I realized i can’t playtest levels as grayboxes because unless it’s been carefully planned (it’s never carefully planned with me) i’ll always have that nag in the back of my head that i won’t know how to make stuff look nice after the flow is done.

it’s all about the learning experience… it’s my first time doing a commercial game that’s not a vn, so there’s a lot of growing pains. Next Game was supposed to be the game that made me go through this, but now once we are back to that one it’s gonna be both ready faster and better built.

anyway, that’s it for this week. Done with a lot of the grind and i’m pretty happy about it, so on monday we start with a lot of the fun stuff, like making new skills, attacks, neat augments that change battle parameters, new enemies, story cutscenes… The real project d starts now!

continued the grind but i lost so much time fixing a big problem i had with the lighting and the use of emissive materials, i almost even lose the progress i made yesterday with the new sections because i didn’t commit my changes last night… so yeah. Crisis averted though…

newprogrammer is still fixing some issues in the behavior for the boss, and his work yesterday looks great and battles have once again lots of juice. gotta fix an issue where they stay white after being hit.

god, i have no idea what will happen tomorrow cause i do have so many things to do and after the problems i ran into today i’ve been feeling like working extra hours, thing i would like to avoid. Maybe I should focus on connecting all sections and finish the third one before i go back to adjust all rooms and lore files to the new plan, cause that’s what i was about to do before looking at the clock.

lots of good work, especially on the new sections of the map. it is my wish to finish em up tomorrow at least partially and begin the content bits asap to begin the story cutscenes.

gonna keep this one short cause i wanna go to sleep.

things to do:

• fix lighting to avoid using emission materials
• reconsider if i want another lame hallway for the third section
• playtest newprogrammer’s work from today
• for fucks sake, finish the pending boss designs to send the batch to be modeled

preview of one of the bits i did today

this morning i made some really good progress on the other two sections, as i already know what i want and how to do it, mapped a lot of it, but had to visit the eye doctor after lunch and see if i had any big issues since i got some spooky symptoms, but everything came out fine except the doc applied these drops that turned me near sighted and photo sensitive until probably tonight… so those sections are gonna have to wait till tomorrow.

I feel really good though, nothing like confirmation from a professional that i’m indeed not going blind anytime soon.

so i did make progress, but mostly on the practical/grindy side of finishing the connection between sections of the level by setting up their cameras, waypoints, battle zones, etc. but as I tried to map further i had no idea what i wanted to do, kinda settled on something but now i’m not sure again. So far my frustration with level design is not exactly coming up with puzzles or anything like that, but rather making it all look good and sensical from an aesthetic standpoint, and I really need to hit a groove of sorts that allows me to come up with more cohesive designs. I’m close, but not enough and it’s really annoying…

For now i’ll just call it a day, feed my brain a bit and then open unity again if i come up with something later tonight.

not much heavy hitting progress on my end as i just made props and textures while thinking about the layout of the other sections and playtesting a new feature of the puzzle system. Played around with the ps1 shader’s cubemap support and made some really good looking stuff in the entrance area.

Looks great coupled with the baked lighting model.

i’m entering a kind of cerebral phase to figure out more fun stuff i want players to go through, so logs might start reading more vague than usual.

That’d be it for this week. I’ll likely won’t work either monday or tuesday for i have to visit the doctor.

all issues from yesterday seem to have been solved except for the weird bullet thingies from the enemies. Added much needed i frames to the player after receiving impact, made the entrance to the level and set up the connections to the other sections from the main hub. playtested some more and noticed there’s really wonky transitions during the boss battle when cutscenes are activated but i think i can solve that with timeline.

some stuff to do:

>camera and cursor triggers for cursor-based puzzles (pretty much the last thing to do feature-wise, at least for this section/level)
>model new funiture for the entrance section
>polish the aforementioned transitions from gameplay to cutscene
>send new designs to the 3d team
>finish outline for the stage and plan the remaining bits of it

no idea when the whole chapter will be done but it’s gonna be interesting to focus mostly on juicing up and fixing from now on in parallel to actually making the content.

Gonna wrap things up and test whatever newprogrammer throws at me for the rest of the night.