Developer Diaries from the Sukeban Staff (mainly just kiri)
hmmm now i don’t think this is gonna be faster than the previous level, it just feels like it’s going faster because i’m having much more fun doing this one. maybe the game should feature more outdoor areas such as this. newprogrammer is gonna add the new attacks when i go to sleeb.
>some quality of life things such as tips now show up during battle
>the favela level is almost halfway there
>bugs regarding weird positioning during battle triggers have been fixed
we decided to just expand our dialogue system instead of using a third party solution, i was wasting precious time trying to learn and frankly speaking we don’t need much, just animation triggers and camera swaps. actual cutscenes can be done using timeline just fine. couldn’t do much else on the actual project since most of the time was spent planning our next moves. we had a call to define where to take certain things and everything is looking up : )
bugs regarding some of the enemies were fixed, now we can actually add the new attacks. for this level we have three new enemy types now and i think that’s a sweet spot. progress on the favela level will continue when i wake up.
been mapping the favela level which i’d say is 40% done, maybe a bit less, but i think it’s going faster than the previous one.
i’ve also been setting up all the necessary stuff for cutscene production and it’s time to decide what type of cutscenes we want here because we are running out of time and i frankly wanna move on already. doesn’t mean i lost passion, don’t get me wrong, but this project is not meant to be a long term thing and corners will be cut! so currently the options are fairly simple, we either do metal gear esque stuff or simple jrpg style dialogue like those you’d see in parasite eve or final fantasy. we’ll find out this week.
i should have done more progress today, but i rather deal with the lighting set up early on so i don’t find myself with an imposibly large issue where i need to change every object in the scene to some obscure setting in order for this to look good. The previous one was fine because it’s an indoors thing, but this level is kind of huge and, well, problems arise.
it’s a mess.
noise artifacts everywhere, not enough light bounce, had to change the ps1 shader to the standard unity shader just to be able to see something when there’s shadows, and somehow a post process that’s not in the scene is still present and i’m kind of losing my mind. i can’t keep building the level in good conscience knowing that when it’s time to actually render everything it will take a gorillion years just to get bad results, so i better find the right settings for the scene before i continue detailing.
busy day, as work on the new level just began and i’ve been doing the modules and blocking out the level itself. to be frank, making levels and subsequently turning them into something pretty is one of the biggest pleasures i get from game development. the thing i probably hate the most is finding bugs and not being able to reproduce them.
since this level is a massive favela i gotta be smart with modular kits, apply what i learned from a failed project and the previous levels i’ve made for the game. the idea here is making enough parts and textures to break up repetition accross the map, and also avoid taking a million years working on it. the section itself is not that long but i really wanna wow players as they venture into this part of the city.
i have the theory that this level won’t take as much time as the previous one due to a set of circumstances (more linear, less puzzles, more focused on setpieces) but time will tell.
i don’t like to make posts that are worth 2 days of work…
planning of the new stage is done, or at least 98%, took longer than i’d like but we have some solid ground over which to build this new one. I think that so far this is the most exciting one, as the visuals are closer to that popular gif i posted on twitter months ago, plus the context is absolute bonkers as i mentioned previously.
we did a slight refactoring of how doors work, since i was having issues setting up new prefabs for them. we also decided to go with fmod for sound design and june is learning the ropes of that one. The result is a neat workflow where he can simply design how sound behaves and we make sure to make it work inside the engine.
last but not least, we found some nasty bugs, such as this one where the player keeps shooting at nothing, stuck in an infinite loop. pay no mind to the awful muzzle vfx, i’ve been fighting with that one for a while now.
for the previous level we just need the enemy models from the 3d art team and i’d be gucci to turn it into a demo/vertical slice should we want to do that.
my sleep cycle is busted again.
Mostly busy creating new attacks for the basic melee enemy. gonna give it a spin attack thingie and a big steppy.
vfx is hard and this is probably the thing that will see the most change as the development moves forward.
most of the stuff in the previous post is done and planning is mostly the thing that occupies my time. Been studying some games too and see how they do the stuff i enjoy about them, but that’s mostly accidental as i never play games for work, i just happen to turn on my brain to galaxy mode in order to learn.
other minor work includes adjusting how attacks are telegraphed, a process i find super comfy and therapeutical. something about tweaking gameplay and game feel things is just super cool.
along with this is a revamp of how enemies deal damage and move around, and also giving them at the very very very least 2 different attacks, i want every battle to feel as good as possible.
new graphics for the targeting and other ui elements, new particles for a battle adjustment that we gonna do over the weekend, more story and planning for the next level, i should probably start full work on it this monday. i’m particularily excited for the context of said coming level since it’s a very absurd thing i can’t wait to talk about in the future.
so one of the things we didn’t quite plan as much as i’d like is audio, and looking around i stumbled upon several solutions to my problems. there’s steam audio, fmod, wwise, and what have you and i’ve been playing around with each of these tools in order to get audio out of the way. we have fantastic music and sound effects already but unity’s way of handling these leaves a lot to be desired, so audio engines are a god send.
new programmer is back and now we can proceed with further polishing. I’m gonna keep working after writing this so i’ll probably keep doing the planning for the next level, learn some more audio workflows and see where that takes me.
some notes for things i wanna do asap
>change damage font (can’t do it myself, and this probably should change…)
>change visuals for the targetting
>do a more finalized mockup of the ui
>install photoshop in this computer…
Here’s a portrait of the main character i drew the other day.
