Sukeban Games

Developer Diaries from the Sukeban Staff (mainly just kiri)

Category: progress

  • october 28

    so there’s many issues that just came outta nowhere, like the player jumping and changing positions when shooting destructibles (and only happens with those..), enemy behavior being all erratic (bullets stuck in the air, grenades going through the floor) among other annoying stuff. No idea why everything’s suddenly acting weird and it’s worrying me plenty. Aside from the playtesting where i saw all of this i worked on a couple props and tidying up the scene replacing some of the placeholders, improving the lighting in some of the areas to start building the other section. I managed to play without stuff breaking (aside from what i mentioned) and it felt incredibly satisfying, so while that’s being fixed i’ll work on the rest of the level and its puzzles, for which i’m very optimistic since the tools we have for the game’s flow are proving to be solid as hell. it’s the combat where most of my headaches reside.

    On project X I worked on some of the characters and began exploring some alternatives for the main layout. X is an adventure game, a classic genre where everything has been said and done, but i want to strike the perfect balance between it looking amazing from any shot and keeping things comfy and fast to produce, so i’d like to think this one through. right now i settled with small portraits while we get a feel for everything and then we’ll see where it takes us.

    Lots of exciting work lately, if only D’s combat wasn’t such a clusterfuck below the hood.

  • october 27

    more grind, including a return to project x now that its writer can work on it again, so i sketched part of the UI inside the engine and made a lot of new elements. tomorrow i’ll probably do some sprites for it (there’s very few characters, so this is gonna be comfy) and some concepts.

    on project D i did more playtesting and will likely keep doing that after this post as newprogrammer fixes and adds things. right now battles for some reason refuse to end, and we gotta find out why. the destructibles i mentioned yesterday are done, and i finished work on new particle effects for bullet impacts that need a lot of tweaking but look certainly more flashy than the previous ones. sound also needs to be adjusted in that department. There’s some props i need to make and texture sets to be finished, but if i do everything today my brain will likely shut down. I haven’t crunched in a long ass while and won’t go back to those pesky habits anytime soon.

  • october 26

    apparently the blog was down?

    lots of work done today. finished the new second phase i came up with for the boss encounter, now i need newprogrammer to make the destructible elements work… we should prolly look into a “destructible maker” of some sort so i can do it myself in the future. Tasks included doing a new cutscene and set up the battlezone with the cameras and stuff, need to tweak this further.

    had some issues with particle effects, most likely because i made it with local parameters from a prefab, but might be talking out of my ass. from now on i won’t make particle systems inside another object cause it worked when i did it again like that.

    stuff to do: new particle effects for damage effects, look into shader swap for enemy fade outs and, again, damage effects (attacks are currently lacking much needed juice), and a new texture set for the current map, as i just finalized the outline for this in my head and pivoted just a bit on its reason-to-be.

    Hopefully i can keep this pace.

  • october 23

    guess what, i did both things: polished the rifle mode and made cutscenes! so that’s something cool. playtested a bunch and found some pesky bugs that only occur when you use a rifle, like getting stuck sometimes between turns, plus enemy bullets not shooting properly during battle was a new one.

    i want to change how weapons are set up but i’m almost sure it already works how i envision it, i just haven’t made new ones in a long time so i have to test that.

    here are a bunch of bugs in action. we have to fix that muzzle, both aesthetically and the fact it’s still active during the victory screen too, and make like an actually good animation for that same victory screen! this one was made in a rush just to have a rough idea of how it should work. victory results are also placeholder.

    more tweaks include giving everything more juice, like enemy animations upon impact, better particle effects, etc. there’s a lot to be done for this to feel truly satisfying, and after i’m done with the 2nd boss phase we’ll probably focus on that.

  • october 22

    made some props for a new part of the setpiece, we just need the thing i mentioned yesterday about being able to link two separate battles. newprogrammer fixed the attack range and it looks great! he also adjusted the colors of the target rings to accomodate some visual cues for when your objective is being blocked by something else, be a prop or another enemy.

    tweaked some of the rooms ever so slightly and began work on a new promotional illustration for n1rvanna (this one took most of my day), since an announcement is coming… don’t know when exactly quite yet, but i want to have art ready for that.

    i’ve been delaying polishing the rifle mode all week now lol, i REALLY should get on that tomorrow, but knowing myself i’ll just keep doing cutscenes if newprogrammer does the battle zone tweak for multi part battles.

    (nevermind the above, he already did that so my brain is gonna fuck up tomorrow, i just know it.. let’s see which task gets to be done tomorrow!)

    edit: forgot to note that newprogrammer fixed a weird bug in the n1rvanna story editor, but it was so quick i forgot to archive that here.

  • october 21

    lots of progress today on the sound department. i was able to quickly whip out an adaptive sequence using timeline hacks (bless this tool). The camera and targeting quirks were fixed, gotta tweak some more stuff but it’s not the disaster i saw yesterday. Also did more n1rvanna art i can’t show… plus we revamped how the area of attack is shown for the player since projectors were giving us some headaches.

    next i have to polish the “rifle mode” with the new animations, maybe even make a new rifle altogether (using one i made super quick like a year ago), do another sound pass for things like footsteps, add a new functionality to the puzzle interactables and the cutscene that connects a victory against the boss to the other section of the level.

  • october 20

    More playtesting, more n1rvanna concept art. Found two nasty issues, one already solved (some prefabs had duplicated scripts due to dumb reasons), the other is that by changing the camera the target issues came back sooooo…

    started working on the audio for the bossfight by doing the behaviors and parameters in fmod, then to do the actual scripting.

    pending things to do short term

    • an actual death cutscene for this boss fight instead of the current placeholder
    • the event that happens after the fight

  • october 19

    back to work after a well deserved weekend rest. been having some quirks with my vision so i’m gonna have that checked sometime this week and take it easy.

    not a whole lot happened outside playtesting but we finally fixed the quirks with the targeting system and the bossfight plays out as expected. now i gotta make it look prettier and do a couple of extra sequences. Looks like i was right and the whole thing was going to be ready by now! I need to do further playests to finally get around a bunch of long delayed tweaks.

  • october 16

    more concept art, but this time n1rvanna focused along with finishing the outline for several characters in the story. Newprogrammer is currently struggling with the targeting that’s causing issues when there’s a lot of elements far from or outside the attack range.

    Sort of a slow day with mostly grind.

  • october 14 and 15

    not a whole lot since most of my work at the moment consists of playtest and drawing concept art. The boss for the set piece is almost there, we just need to fix some issues with the targeting system (it goes insane when you suddenly have a bunch of environmental things you can shoot). After that is done we will tweak the interactable system to support clicks (again) since there’s a pretty confusing puzzle at the end that would benefit from a top down camera to click the elements inside it instead of manually moving the character around (found out about this after seeing newprogrammer get lost in that specific bit). item mixing is working great, i love how it looks, just need to add some juice to recently created objects.

    been also writing some character outlines for n1rvanna, but that’s gonna extend to tomorrow since i’m pretty tired and i have a sort of creative block right now. Hopefully when i wake up my hands will move on their own.