setpiece done except for the actual fight and a game over cutscene, puzzles done with their respective cutscene this time for real. lots of playtesting, sound tweaking, bug fixing, and building the boss fight. Everything works so far, game didn’t break while i was working on the sequence. I’m really optimistic in that we will have this ready by sometime this or next week depending on the number of snafus. we got this!! vertical slice soon my dudes.
Category: progress
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october 12
lots of playtesting and tweaking and fixing, kind of glad most of the things causing issues were oversights from forgetting to set up stuff correctly.
- fixed an issue where the item crafting wouldn’t reset properly
- added a cooldown after battles so the battle area doesn’t spawn again in the same place, making you fight over and over until you step in the right spot when it ends
- added missing signal receivers to several playable directors that were preventing me from making progress
- initial set up for the setpiece is complete, now we start designing the behavior for the midboss
- made a bunch of new cutscenes for the puzzle sequences
gonna keep playtesting for a bit longer after this then gonna try to go to bed early-ish. stuff is going very well, and i’m actually a nervous mess since we are nearing the point where the vertical slice will be ready enough to get feedback from others. Would have loved to do this earlier in development but i wasn’t expecting this game to be such a learning experience. I think that if we began making this game today with the stuff we know already about how to build it, we would have this year’s worth of progress in about two months or so… which in turn makes me excited for future projects !!!!!
tomorrow i’d like to both keep playtesting and design more characters, there’s a bunch i wanna get ready for a trailer.
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ocotober 9
made a victory animation and worked some more on the level, this time scrapping one of the most important rooms for something completely different and it looks really good so far!
newprogrammer has been working hard on the rest of the items and a lot of it needs playtesting. one of them being the victory sequence but apparently the game is breaking when a battle is over, so we gotta look into it.
i’ll likely work tomorrow and i want it to be mostly playtesting to further polish things, and then begin on some promotional artwork.
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october 8
lots of long overdue stuff got done today and solved a bunch of worries regarding on-screen prompts for different platforms too. text mesh pro has inline sprites and that came in super handy, plus we settled with a very familiar iconography you probably see a lot on the switch.
doesn’t mean it’s gonna be running on switch (we can only realistically do this on pc because of our very small team) but this will be mad helpful for any controllers people can potentially have around.
overhauled the inventory a bit as well as polished other aspects of the UI while newprogrammer fixes many of the weird behaviors i’ve been seeing as of late in battles and during menu usage. fixed a thing with the item crafting (just a prefab that wasn’t correctly updated in my scene) and further worked on the set piece. the whole thing needs more playtesting but once i polish those rough edges i can start doing the cutscene with the midboss and give this a proper game over screen that’s not just the placeholder we have atm.
i really wanna finish this section of the level so i can use it as a private demo to get feedback. been holding off on letting others try it since so much relies on atmosphere (shit’s just as important to me as raw gameplay, capisci?) and while i can easily roll out a battle-only demo, battles aren’t my biggest worry, i know they are fun, but it’s my first time doing level design so the exploration has me on edge.
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october 7
been playtesting and working on the new ui elements from last week’s list in order to further cement the finalized look of it.
I’m a bit torn on font selection, since i want a specific look and feel for things you have to read that are related to the level (say, reading a log/book/note or just prompts like “this door is closed”), and an entirely different aesthetic for the numbers, messages during battle and menus which is more pixel art and computer-looking, so i’ll probably have to hit the books on ui/ux design to see what are the best practices.
& finally wrapped up the essential rooms from the setpiece and checked the puzzle results trigger as intended. I had one scare where a multi-part one just didn’t want to activate properly but turns out those specifically break if the key item was already in the inventory, so we gotta fix that too.
I need to up my game to be honest, past couple days have been a bit slow/all about grinding but haven’t been able to properly balance a couple things in my day to day activities in order to get some good work done without killing myself.
in n1rvanna news, lark just finished an important outline for the game and what’s left needs to be discussed with the team.
All in all some good was done! tomorrow should be interesting since i gathered a pretty beefy list of details to tweak and fix from today’s playtesting.
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wrapping up early
so apparently ludum dare starts in like a couple hours and i rather begin fresh rather than all beat up from work so i’ll just finish real quick.
good news is that i partially completed two more rooms and just need to add props. that brings the count to only two rooms left to finish this floor!
will go back to it after the weekend is done. gonna try to focus on two particular aspects: make battles look better (some effects broke by changing ps1 shaders), maybe integrate again a transition between exploration and combat, work on the cutscene for the midboss and stress test the item crafting feature that’s allegedly done but newprogrammer has been busy with n1rvanna.
that’d be all for this week!
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october 1st
another day another couple rooms, only 4 left! lots of props made today, some of them unique that won’t be used anywhere else.
newprogrammer has only a few items left from the editor so he might be jumping to project d soon-ish, providing a lot of the items go through revision…
ludum dare this weekend!
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september 30
more prop-making for the rooms in the dungeon and partially finished the one i was working on, so only five rooms remain! had some issues with the lightmaps but apparently i only have to keep increasing texel size until the artifacts go away????? shit works in mysterious ways, and it’s probably the way i do these rooms.
also spent most of the day working on the animations i mentioned yesterday, they came out nice and the answer was indeed to work it on blender instead of using umotion in unity. umotion i feel should be used mostly to edit already existing animations instead of making them from scratch. like, it can totally do the latter but blender is just too comfy.
that said these animations are mostly placeholders (for as long as they took me…) as i already began looking for nice freelance 3d animators that can provide extra animation clips. while i might have already found someone, please if you got some cool skills shoot me an email to hellyeahmoney@sukeban.moe so i can have you in my shortlist even if i don’t reply back.
Newprogrammer is almost done with the new features in the n1rvanna story editor so that’s pretty cool, though a lot of nodes are awaiting for feedback and… well, i’m not the one who has to provide said feedback so that can take god knows how long.
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september 29
finished the model for the midboss (topology, texturing and rigging) and kept struggling to animate it for the rest of the day. I’m doing something really wrong here and i must find out what cause i don’t wanna waste more time doing this!!! animation is all fun and games except when it doesn’t look like the thing you had in mind, so i gotta regroup and maybe do every clip in blender instead of unity.
new programmer is probably still working on the n1rvanna tool.
that’s it for this kinda disappointing day…
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september 28
didn’t feel like i did a whole lot, but looking back i did get some shit done that i’ve been posponing, like decorating the rooms in the setpiece we are making (2 out of 7 or 8 rooms already mostly finished), doing props for those and began modeling the midboss from that very setpiece.
newprogrammer is still doing N1rvanna Story Editor stuff.
all in all pretty comfy, mostly just grinding instead of struggling and i prefer things to be this way.