Note to self: Write progress as I go in a draft and then publish at the end of the month so I don’t forget shit I did.
May was rough for me, mentally speaking. Not because I was feeling particularly miserable, but rather that I’m still not used to seeing writing as actual progress cause all I do is put words in excel while the game itself remains full of placeholder levels and stuff. The good news is that I finished the game’s script. For real.
It’s still the first draft, and it’s the 4th rewrite this game has gone through. We’re pretty happy with the direction after a fun table read, with some adjustments to do and things to watch out for that I’ve been chipping away in between other tasks. One thing I really liked got scrapped, but that’s the nature of the beast.
After exiting the excel dungeon I started helping with playtesting, feedback, concept art, etc.
Finished the models for the base weapons, some of the boss rewards, all accessories, upgrades. Was a ton of work but thankfully we already had those written down months ago for this very moment.
Now that June is around the corner, it is time to step on the proverbial gas and do a sprint towards a content complete build. With the script done I feel confident with how the rest of the game is gonna play out.
I’m never making a game as I go again. Holy shit.
Omake:
Redesign for a character that was already modeled. The previous one didn’t make much sense and this is a straight upgrade (will show the older design when the game is out…)From concept to usable prop. Took me an afternoon to do all of the modeling, texturing and vfx work. The design was already drawn months ago, but only got around implementing the design very recently.Another cool design.
Concept to prop, part 2.
Reila’s base arsenal. Don’t know if we’ll add more (bosses drop weapons not pictured here) but I think this is a healthy variety.
I wanted to do more frequent updates but I’ll just accept that I’m not disciplined enough to keep track of my daily work activity like I used to.
Moreover, work progress has been steady and without much in the way of issues to cry about (aside from old issues still arising this far into dev).
I’ve been slowly writing the game (currently finishing the 4th chapter out of 7) and gameplay-wise the second chapter is nearly done with the exception of visuals and the boss fight that we’re still debugging.
Preview of the 2nd chapter. Lighting hasn’t been baked yet.
I had a nasty personal thing happening a couple weeks ago and didn’t work at all during the holy week/easter (I usually work those dates), but we’ve been back on track-ish ever since. I was worried about a lack of direction and focus when it came to the story, but I was able to write a lot of dialogue without a lot of drama after distilling what I really wanted and tweaking some aspects that didn’t feel natural. Very few issues as well other than figuring out the goal of each interaction and making sure there’s no redundant info being given to the players.
I’m still insecure about a lot of it but that’s just how creative work is. I’ll never know if this is any good until you guys play it, though in my head it’s all pretty cool.
Current goal is to actually finish the game’s script for real this time. There’s been some moments where I felt the whole game was already written, or that I was much further than I thought I was. But now that I’m doing all of this with the finalized structure I can safely say I’ll wrap this up very soon. It’s gonna be my priority despite not feeling like real work (something I struggle with a lot with when I do story stuff only).
Hmm, maybe monthly updates are a nice middle-ground instead of being vague every day about shit. I don’t wanna stop writing these logs but they add up!
I mentioned that I would update more frequently and that I would find a more optimal way to write and archive these, but none have come to fruition. Not gonna worry about that, I just find it funny.
Been pretty busy with non-work stuff for the past week and a half too. Just lots of things going on between paperwork and problems in my apartment that needed to be figured out.
Lots of progress, though.
While I can’t list everything, much of what was accomplished has been quite big. The task that took me the longest was writing the game’s lore inside a local Wiki that I can cross-reference while writing. I decided to do this after noticing how much redundant dialogue there is currently, and in order to avoid this I had to find a way to properly order my thoughts and ideas on this world we made. You know, to make sure every piece of dialogue is worth having in the game and that they all provide something different.
I was also able to build the whole “second” level and make it playable relatively quick. A friend tested it and I’m on the right path, I just need to fix the latter half of it with a more interesting backtrack. There’s a new type of enemy already implemented and I’m currently drawing new concept art for things that need to be modeled.
The bulk of work has been what I mentioned about the lore, which took most of the past month (two and a half weeks, I think) and I’m still not done. It felt as if progress suddenly halted but it was needed.
Another thing we needed was to clean the project and do some light refactors, like getting rid of code we don’t need and make elements in the inspector easier to read.
I’m pretty excited since most new features are all small and they don’t require much maintenance. Only issue at the moment is finding a good way to debug gameplay but we’ve already built a bunch of tools for that. I just hope we don’t forget to turn them off for the final build.
There’s this pesky issue that keeps happening where players spawn below the desired geometry and it’s driving me crazy, but it’s so far limited to two rooms. Maybe the fixes haven’t been applied to those.
Here’s hoping I can regain the rhythm I had before the crazy week that happened.
Omake
Gonna post some concept art since it’s all cool stuff you’ll see anyway, or won’t make it to the final product.
This is how the man currently looks like in the game. I tend to model the very essentials such as shape and main colors first, with the final size too in order to iron out details before texturing. The current process takes a couple days from concept art to first playable version. The whole thing involves rigging, some crude animation work and basic particle effects just to get all references right.
Illustration of the main character, Reila.
I had a lot of fun doing this even though it wasn’t part of my plans yesterday. I’m glad I didn’t stop myself from drawing it since it allowed me to find the feel for certain things I was having trouble with. The game is finally acquiring its final form and I love it.
Let this be a reminder: It’s okay to find the soul of your work along the way.
Work on the second boss fight is underway. We have three of those already done but this one belongs to the second stage, so it’s the second boss…
While newprogrammer does that, along with some housekeping to the enemy AI code, I’ll be redesigning some parts of the new dungeon since it’s not really all that fun after actually playing it.
I think I like the way I made the previous one much more, so I’m combining that with the ideas that were already implemented. Sucks to trash a lot of hours spent on this level, but such is the prototyping phase.
At least said prototyping is much faster now and I can identify unfun bits real quick (or so I hope…)
Current big issue seems to be geometry not unloading but that’s likely a typo in one of the strings. I’m not too worried about that. Goal for this week is to keep iterating on this map to make it as fun as it can be, while also playtesting the boss fight. Dialogue’s already written so that’s cool. It’s all about assembling the dang game.
I could swear I updated days ago but looks like I dreamed it.
We struggled a bit stabilizing the game after plugging in the second chapter (mostly due to adding things that weren’t accounted for in the intermission segment), but the game is running well again and I’ve been assembling the logic of the second chapter’s map. Thankfully most of the work was done last year! All the base geometry and camera set up was dealt with by past me (thank you so, so much, dude) so now I’ve been adding battle zones and dialogue. Process has been comfy with no tight bottlenecks outside having good, swappable placeholders for new skills and attacks (a lot of the time I have to set stuff up for newprogrammer but sometimes I’m busy with something else so it slows down some tasks).
Some housekeeping is in order, but the next big task for us boils down to designing the boss battle, two new enemy types, then implement the planned weapons and skills.
Ah, the sound of a game being made at a good pace.
Still anxious about the story and writing but it’s nothing I can’t fix.
Omake
A clip I posted on twitter and discord that for some reason isn’t here:
Let's lift the veil of mystery for a bit! The battle system as of now is focused around weapon type variety and being able to combine them with other tools and skills to manage all sorts of enemy groups.#screenshotsaturdaypic.twitter.com/tXvLA5rvlN
The game already looks better than the video above (gameplay was captured late last year).
An area I worked on today. It’s gonna be somewhat different when the game ships.Boss concept art sneak peek. Might not even be in the final game but I like the vibe.
Week’s been pretty smooth. Lots of environment work, writing, and editing dialogue sequences. Some bug fixes took care of very serious issues, and thankfully it wasn’t anything particularly hard to fix.
I think the biggest breakthrough moment this week was figuring out how to balance the work needed for the intermission sections. These required a lot of energy from me in their planned iteration, but now they seem to be pretty comfy to pull off. They will be light on sequencing, and the dialogues can be written fairly quick.
I’m still curious on how long it will take us to finish the second chapter but we’ll get there as soon as we plug that in.
I know for a fact that I can do a whole level playable within a week (without polishing the visuals) but there are other more nebulous factors such as enemy and boss design that take the bulk of the effort in this game.
And that’s a good thing! Like, compared to how we planned to make this thing I’m actually pretty damn thankful most of the work boils down to designing interesting enemies and situations. The rest is normal things I can schedule without a lot of drama.
Some of the scenes I whipped out in the past couple days.
The game is feeling more real than ever.
Omake:
I’m using a shader for the depth of field effect, since it gives me much cleaner results than the post processing stack. Also, take a look and how simple these environments are!
And the cool shining effect was done with particles. After I took the screenshots I noticed particles were stretched vertically instead of horizontally, so that’s already fixed and looks better than the gif I posted.
I went back to the excel prison to write dialogue for the second chapter. Looks like the game needs more words than I initially expected after reducing the scope… but it’s manageable, I just doubt I’ll have everything in one week. Had a bit of a creative block too due to several matters unrelated to work.
We made some changes to the way dialogue windows work. Now they don’t use character positioning on camera but rather fixed waypoints on the canvas. Makes things faster but I also had to go back and alter every single dialogue from the first map lol and I really wanna move on.
There’s still some issues with cameras that keep giving me blackpills to swallow and I’m not sure I want to make this game with fixed camera angles anymore. I literally spend too much time adjusting that shit.
Aside from this things are going fine. We’re yet to implement the second chapter (there’s a bunch of things that no longer work due to outdated prefabs) but it’s gonna be next week’s goal for real.
Still nervous about the game becoming too big to manage at code level but that’s what we’re trying to avoid by fixing all situations in the current most polished chapter and identifying bottlenecks. For now it’s time for the weekend.
By the way, I made a new game and you can find it here. It’s a short VN; another one of my writing attempts in order to get better at it. Managed to drain a lot of emotions with this so I hope you guys check it out.
Let’s see if I can keep it steady. Not gonna promise daily updates but they should be frequent; at least in theory.
It’s impossible to list everything I did ever since I took a break from this archive, but it’s basically all good news.
Got the game stable enough (save for some elements that need to be less reliant on cross-dependencies), the first level is on a fair level of polish and now we’re adding the second one that’s already prototyped into the game proper.
There’s a shitload of things to do and fix but I’m optimistic.
The one thing that’s still murky is the story. I’m rewriting it so it makes sense with the current format. My old scripts were more cinematic with the larger scope of the previous iteration of the project so now I gotta go back and do it all over. I’m planning to pen the whole thing by the end of this week or the next.
Feedback with some friends who playtested the first level was positive. Game didn’t break too much and seeing people dig the combat was relieving… but the reaction to the story, or lack of thereof, is the thing that’s got me worried, and the very reason I’m gonna focus on writing for the next week.
We took our holiday break by december 15th then went back to work last monday.
Not gonna be able to update this archive for a bit. Work has been consistent and going very well but amid some other changes I’m applying to my lifestyle I’ll need all the energy I can get. I’ve also been thinking of ways to actually improve the way I write these logs so they are more useful for me and the handful of folks who follow it. Not gonna make any promises but it’s a thing in the back of my head that I’d like to get around once I have the mental bandwidth.
I’ll go back to regular updates in maybe a week or two!
Back to the excel prison to write extra scenes. Plus a new environment.
Due to ongoing changes with the game’s format (to make it leaner and easier to produce) the story has gotten way cooler and cerebral. I’ve been relying more on imagery and symbolism to transmit what’s going on, which couldn’t have occurred without the limitations we imposed on ourselves. Now, this is already the style I like to go for (if you check any of my story-drivenshorts you’ll get a pretty good idea) but the previous scale had me with more cinematic ambitions; now it’s a very unique beast that I’m as excited to figure out as the ones who will hopefully play it when it’s out.
Apropos of nothing but weekends are a double-edged sword. I rest the two full days but once monday comes I completely lose track of the immediate tasks. Good thing newprogrammer said key words key enough to snap me back into reality and do some cool work.
I do write down stuff to do and whatnot, but something’s lost when I don’t touch the project. I hate losing that momentum.
