so i’m officially in a hard creative block and i feel like jumping from the top rope to headbutt the mat. it’s really frustrating because it’s the only thing keeping me from just plain keep going with the plan.
Yesterday there was more brainstorming and some concept art done, merenge as always doing a fantastic job. nenwprogammer is still integrating the ui stuff on my new design and it’s looking great. the animations are very satisfying and it’s addtive to press the buttons and see the things move around.
We did do a lot this week but still feels wasted since we have everything in place to just do what needs to be done, but here we are. Not gonna give up though.
newprogrammer suggested that instead of wasting time musing about what to do for the plot of the demo (because every other level is basically laid out already) we can go ahead and finish what’s left of the main menu in-game, so we went for that today pretty late since we had life stuff a bit in the way. We’ve been on this AND planning things out. I had to do a lot of last minute tweaks to said UI since the original layout had some fundamental issues that i was sure unity was going to absolutely hate and bite me in the ass down the line, so yeah, stuff.
Aside from fixing some bugs we’ve been all day brainstorming and writing the content from the demo. You know that one episode in shirobako where the team sat on a meeting room all day without seemingly making progress? something like that, but it’s me and newprogrammer butting heads against a piece of paper and actually making some progress. I expect the next couple days to be like this since we wanna get it right.
First time i make an update worth 3 days, though the third day is still on going and i am in fact still working.
Stuff these days has been mostly been wrapping up stuff and fixing a bunch of pending things and quirks that weren’t too high in the list of prioritities, such as:
enemies would attack two times in the same turn
player keept moving after dying
sometimes the warning effect to telegraph attacks would disappear when attacked, or not show up at all before the attack animation
player kept looking at the wrong direction while shooting
further fmod integration
the spinning attack would make enemies teleport to weird places
the ground stomp attack looks super rough
new animations for casting and shooting
integrate enemy models
event triggers after battles
fix the way weapons spawn in the player’s hands
There’s still way more stuff to get around to fix but that’s what we’ve been doing the past couple days. Other than this, most of the time has gone into planning for the story, ideas for puzzles, level design and concept art. We want to have most of the things ready to send to the 3d team while we develop stuff for the demo. It feels safe to say we are making the actual game now instead of polishing the systems, like, for real and it feels so daunting and scary but that’s game development for you.
If it looks pretty enough I’ll treat everybody to a nice taste of gameplay this saturday. No promises though! For now i’ll go back to work, and likely not rest this weekend…
Only real G’s will recognize this epic gamer reference…
i keep finding frustrating bugs that make no sense or know how to trigger, one of them being this where the main character won’t point to the enemies and has the target range all borked. i think battles just need a code overhaul at this point.
and the day finally came where i stopped procrastrinating the fmod integration and gave the game some much needed care in the audio department. The audio design will be a joint between me and june since he’s a bit less tech savvy for now, but we shall learn on the way to success. For now i’m just worried that i can’t seem to trigger parameters from different scripts but i’m likely missing something disregard that, i suck cocks. i just had to look at the right bit in the documentation.
Gotta add a script for the footstep sounds based on materials too.
Guess i’m a tad anxious too since we’ve had the enemy models for a while now but haven’t been able to integrate those just yet. i really wanna show some gameplay, maybe even make a trailer with more polished assets.
this update is for suday progress, as i didn’t do shite today.
i’m now using another lighting solution for unity called Bakery, and so far the results have been amazing. I might need to dive more into its inner workings since i can’t get mixed lighting to work correctly, but it dramatically decreased baking times for lighting thus saving me a bunch of time during level iteration. Only downside is that because i don’t know how to handle mixed lighting yet i have to manually place lighting probes all over the scene. It’s not much of an issue since it’s not that annoying, but it’s certainly added work for the polishing stages. I could easily just start working with unlit character models, but i like the dramatic effect shadows give to the atmosphere. There’s also another level of craftmanship involved too i guess, where i have to be super precise with the probes to get everything just right… which i technically shouldn’t because this is a ps1-styled game but hey, if i have fun and the game looks great…
i’d post an example of the results achieved but i’m on bed with with my laptop. Seriously, i couldn’t get up from bed today. I feel fine, both physically and mentally, but suuuuper tired and couldn’t stay awake for the short time i spent on my desktop. I hope i can go back full swing tomorrow.
so the sequencing thing is 99% finished after much struggle, so we are going over that one to see if it’s rock solid. been also doing level and environment design by polishing the demo’s dungeon, and i’d say it’s looking pretty great!
remember when i said dark times were ahead? they are here, sooner than i expected too, so work has been spotty. newprogrammer has been laser focused on finishing the last bit of the timeline extensions since yesterday and it seems it’s gonna take some work to get it right, as timeline is rather poorly documented, which is a shame. As for me… Well, i’ve been trying to do the usual stuff, but stupid and recurrent shit keeps getting getting in the way of optimal performance. I’m trying to take it easy, study more and practice more so the atmosphere is perfectly conveyed without spending my life working on this, so it’s not like i’ve been staring at the wall in dire moments. There’s a lot of planning i have to do and it’s pretty daunting to think of all the things i need to write on paper before moving onto the bigger things. My hope is that i’m up for the task and willing to finally change my environment and the way i go about things, i’m frankly tired of stumbling over the same rock.
more environment work, but not sure about this one and will likely need some actual concept art before nailing the atmosphere of this one, plus a bit more planning on how to structure the scene parts so it’s not too messy to edit later.
Almost done with the cinematic tools since we decided to extend timeline instead of finish the one we were making. We keep finding more and more useful tools in unity midway through development of said tool almost from scratch, but instead of doing the sunk cost fallacy meme we jump ship without looking back, as the long-term benefits are way more sound than to keep a shoddy program just because we already had a bunch of work done. This is an important skill in development and something everyone should keep in mind. Cut the fat if it’s not needed, even if it took a lot of work.
Finished the environment from the other day, or at least the main “signature” visuals. i did indeed make some good textures and it’s slowly becoming one of my favorite maps but it can be even better. this week we’ll going back to D to fix a lot of pending issues and features to leave it in a place where i can keep building the content while newprogrammer dedicates himself more to the nitty gritty.
I do feel that some dark times are ahead of us, but nothing we can’t manage.
