Sukeban Games

Developer Diaries from the Sukeban Staff (mainly just kiri)

Category: progress

  • leaking

    I noticed that the game would slow down severely over time. This wasn’t very obvious because i had an fps cap in place for uhhh, ps1 immersion but things were getting so choppy between playthroughs that i got rid of it. turns out the issue is a memory leak, and since the game was choppy all along on purpose we never noticed.

    so this week is gonna be all about refactoring the code! the code itself isn’t that much of a mess, but we were using solutions we thought would prevent memory issues but those solutions were the problems in the first place. i don’t expect this to take very long since it only happens in one scene, but fun progress isn’t to be expected in the coming days.

    in other news, i noticed i had dynamic bone in my assets folder and quickly set up some hair physics. looks pretty nice!

  • 4/10/20

    not a lot other than playtesting, now with a new targetting system! it works like a charm and the game now plays like an actual videogame instead of an interactive mess.

    i also got new models from the folks at thundercloud, look at this cool stuff.

    the bottom character was designed by the lovely merenge_doll on twitter, who’s been working with us for a while now as a sukeban employee.

    my job right now is merely creative. coming up with new enemy types, kickass level design, character design, writing… i love it, but sometimes doesn’t feel like i’m pulling my weight compared to the rest of the team. such is the joy of having fun doing what you love.

  • 4/8/20

    game seems stable and we are now getting rid of some of the jank.

    >player loses its center after every fight
    >accelerate battles, by increasing the speed of enemy death and rate of fire
    >apparently the player death broke but didn’t notice cause we never die
    >we never die because the AI attacks before getting close to the player

    right now the priority is the first item and integrate the new targeting system. I’m going back to the drawing board regarding level design since i’ve learned some new stuff and not very happy with the current classic doom-like approach. don’t get me wrong, i love doom and romero’s design ideas are still fresh, the thing is that i want all places to feel grounded instead of the weird contraptions you can find in games like the aforementiones one.

  • playtesting and polishing

    been playing some more after a few rough patches. first half of the level is functioning, all prefabs work as intended and stuff. doing some polishing around the level as well but if i’m being honest i might start a new level from scratch, using the same theme but with a new layout. this is mostly because i commited the mistake of placing basic textures and when i do that i just get the urge to keep polishing stuff, making future changes a bit more hard even if the geometry is made with probuilder.

    i need some documentation on how doors work but i made them work anyway. Some qol stuff on the way, like item pickup notification and some puzzle clues in the form of uhh, the classic notes and logs i guess.

    one of my favorite rooms in this level

    My fear is increasing, i don’t know if the final design will be as fun as i had envisioned, so as soon as this basic level is rock solid in my own two eyes i will just shoot a build to friends to get feedback.

  • 4/5/20

    more playtesting. everything in the previous post was fixed! newprogrammer is truly the best girl. found more stuff but that was also fixed.

    that’s it, it’s sunday and wanted to keep it light.

  • happy birthday dad

    more playtesting, found even more bugs, including ones that we thought were fixed.

    • sometimes battles don’t end, cause unknown
    • can’t equip weapons for some reason (this was already done months ago, dunno what happened)
    • wrong attack animations showing up after one battle, like the pistol’s when using a rifle
    • both weapons show up as equipped in the inventory

    the game is so broken is not even funny but gotta keep on fighting. kinda discouraging to see a bunch of things that were working fine suddenly break like this, and it’s not like they weren’t playtested, those were the first things we ironed out before this phase.

  • 4/3/20

    been playtesting and finding bugs that need to be squished, also realized that the controls need a bit more tweaking, namely changing the way you target enemies so it’s adapted to the new movement scheme. It’s playable but super uncomfortable and that ain’t gonna fly with me, it needs to be smooth like butter.

    other than that i’m really feeling the structure, gotta keep testing more but things are looking up.

  • Finally testing the level

    After many last minute adjustments i can finally playtest the game properly with all systems interacting with one another, pretty fucking cool if you ask me. It’s kinda terrifying though because while battles are fun and the puzzles are nice too, there’s this fear that even if it’s all working and feeling like it should the structure of the game isn’t as fun as i had envisioned, but that’s what iteration is for.

    I also need to remind myself to never let players fall like this.

  • foolishness

    Some more texturing and level design, puzzle is ready and we just need to adjust the interaction system to start playing around in a comfy manner. In the meantime i just kept doing everything else that’s pending.

    Tried to set up IK’s for the feet and results were amusing.

    I wanna be healthy again!!

  • puzzling

    Been using the puzzle tool to design this one and it’s going great so far, just need to remember to write down some documentation for these since i forgot how to use an inventory system i wrote.

    tomorrow i should probably start drawing concepts for enemies, i wanna show some gameplay without using graymen.