Gave myself a long weekend to regroup. Spent most of my day drawing the new map and it’s almost done, just gotta figure out how to make the second half flow in more interesting ways. Newprogrammer finished a new set of menus for the characters that also serve as shops. We have this thing where you can find items, give it to em and in return they’ll give you some backstory about themselves. So we needed an interface that can accomodate for that and the shop menus.

I have to check all of that tomorrow. Once I have the map properly drawn I can start prototyping it inside Unity.

The current map is a special one; for it hosts the first ever boss we programmed and modeled. I’m essentially coming back to this with new eyes and experience, and I’m treading carefully as the first iteration of this level was responsible for us starting over again from scratch almost a year ago.

I checked my schedule and apparently I’m nearly a month behind the original deadline but that was to be expected. The previous estimate had me finishing whole large maps in a week or less, and after finishing a couple of those, two weeks seems like a more sensible timeframe.

When I make these maps I don’t polish them visually or anything. The bulk of the work is modeling the entire layout based on my initial drawings, then do some camera set up, door set up and then enemy placement. It’s working out just fine so far; I just wish there was a simpler way to handle doors that take you from one scene to the next.

Yesterday I built more of the map’s logic and camera set ups, but couldn’t do a whole lot today. My plan didn’t go as expected and might have to redraw a significant portion of an already simple layout. Turns out simplicity is sometimes harder to pull of than a complex labyrinth full of secrets and shortcuts.

I’m stuck on what to do, so I’ll go ahead and work on the chapter 4 map, then go back to the aforementioned one once I have a better idea of what I’d like to do. This is so I don’t get hung up on a single concept, end up hating it and delay the schedule over simple hard-headed attitudes.

Plus, the boss of this map ain’t even designed yet so it’s not like it’s high on the list of priorities.

Had a briefing with newprogrammer and settled on the final player progression, and I think it will be done by friday. It’s mostly all already there code-wise, just untested. So now that we have the save system working and looking nice it’s time we jump to that next level.

Game feels more real than ever.

Finished a first draft of the map I began last week and I’m now giving it logic. Needs more doors and battle zones.

Also made some new UI elements (new shopping menus and auto save icons)

Newprogrammer wrapped up the save system and now we’re gonna implement character progression. Much of it was already there but not included in the game loop yet. He also fixed some bits regarding character movement.

Tomorrow more of the same, plus debugging cameras again to test the new fixes.

Sketched a new level and prototyped a bit of it too.

Fun fact: This one is so three dimensional it was actually faster for me to just draw it using probuilder. Almost no camera set up either as I chose a single camera on a vertical dolly for the bigger section. It looks pretty good!

It’s going very well, and I consider it a big departure from previous maps. Layout-wise it’s definitely the simplest and there’s a chance I’ll be done with it this week. The focus this time around is battles and the situations occurring inside them.

Drafted a bit of dialogue too.

Current fear: That I lose patience and start making subsequent maps overly simplistic.

My plan to mitigate that is to come up with interesting scenarios so each map can be as unique as possible. Focusing on different things. I don’t think people will complain about heavy layout departures as long as we keep it fun and fresh, but we’ll see. None of these maps are polished and I can change anything about them on a whim if I want.

Gotta keep debugging cameras though, as the script we made for it kinda blows in certain scenarios. You can’t see it here probably but Reila’s orientation changed when the battle finished, making controls funky.

Yesterday was hell day where tools were breaking (thankfully not related to this project), fucked performance issues that mess with the game logic (sadly very related to this project) and adjacent issues that took up most of my time and couldn’t finish the map I’ve been working on. It was bad, but at least it ended on a fun note. Just playing elden ring with newprogrammer until a bit past midnight.

Today I did manage to wrap up the map except for some logic (keys and battle zones), so I’m gonna do that next monday.

Seems that every map will take me little over two weeks, not including polishing (texturing, modeling props, lighting passes… but that’s quick in comparison).

I’ve updated my internal estimates based on that and I’m pretty optimistic, providing we can fix the performance shit. That and how long it will take to design more enemy types and bosses but that’s all done in parallel on newprogrammer’s side.

I have five more maps to go, and one of those is rather small and not an actual level, so that’d be 4 big ones left. Assuming all level design and polishing is done in the next couple months, I’ll take a wild guess and say boss and enemy design will be the focus for the rest of the year. Who knows what will happen during that phase.

Happy weekend!

Had to upgrade Unity because of the collaborate to plastic scm migration. It was… kind of a pain in the ass. The process itself is simple, but my computer nearly exploded and had me all scared. It had nothing to do with the engine update but the scare was enough for me to relate the process with my hard drive almost dying.

After that I spent most of the day adjusting collision boxes and cameras. Playtesting here and there, and setting up the base for the next map. I’ll try to have as much as I can by friday.

Newprogrammer finished the new save system but I’m yet to check it out. It was probably incredibly annoying, so I didn’t ask much and told him to relax watching AEW Dynamite.

Suzuki vs Joe was great, but the afterbirth was questionable.

Couldn’t do much since I had a medical appointment (every tuesday, in fact).

I did finish what I set out to do which was a sketch for the next level. Then some rudimentary menus to customize resolution since I have to test the game in other hardware to make sure it runs alright.

I have a laptop; a razer one from like 2017-ish. It’s pretty good and I recently swapped the battery, as the old one died and almost exploded (real). It’s not for gaming – despite the razer brand, so it’s a good gauge for how well the game is running.

We had a bit of a scare when I saw the game running at like 8 fps on that cpu and I was wondering what the hell was going on. Turns out it was running at 4k! The monitor is 4k, and Unity defaults to full screen at the native resolution. Tested again with 1080 and 720 res and it runs flawlessly.

Thing is, it should be optimized enough to run on a 2017 laptop at 4k. It’s a ps1-inspired game after all, right? Gotta look into that.

There’s a lot to improve when it comes to performance, but a lot of it also has to come once the levels are finalized and polished. I’ll need to list which items can be static batched, same with materials where some need specific values and tags depending on the mesh complexity, and a hefty etc. – can’t do that if every asset is a probuilder placeholder.

Newprogrammer wrapped up the first part of the new checkpoint and save systems, next is to polish some of the enemy behavior, then shops.

Including Saturday.

That’s right, I committed the sin of working on a weekend.

I haven’t done that in god knows how long. Probably years. But hey, I wasn’t doing it out of obligation or anything; I simply was having fun with the gameplay and I wanted to play more.

It’s the first time in the time since we began this project that I’m actively having fun with the adjacent aspects of the game that are not combat and it’s a total paradigm shift for me as both developer and a player/fan of what we’re doing.

As a result of that spontaneous need to work on the game this saturday I did in fact finish the preliminary map for this chapter, and tomorrow I’ll draw the next one. I was supposed to do it today but I got distracted by other things. Both work and irl errands.

I saw newprogrammer play the level over stream and I took many mental notes; mostly about the visual language of the level itself in regards to exploration that needs some tweaking. There were bits that weren’t meant to be seen but he went there anyway just because the was an opening. Stuff like that.

This week he’ll focus on the implementation of some already coded mechanics that are not in the current loop, as well as changes to the save system and in-game shops.

My personal goal would be to have at least half of the next chapter’s level already playable by friday. Then next week we design and implement a new boss battle.

Again, lots of work to do but now it’s all with real purpose and goals. It’s been a (sometimes extremely painful) learning experience but we’ll keep on trucking.

Spent most of the day putting together some of the last sections of this level, but also debugging and helping adjust certain things.

Some problems arose that need fixing asap. Chief among them that the hitboxes for some of the enemy attacks are busted. We don’t know why.

It’s actually quite baffling, since there’s no way it can do damage outside the hitbox, yet it does! It’s driving me insane.

We also fixed some kinks in how dialogues are displayed.

It doesn’t feel like I’m almost done with this level; if anything I think there’s like a whole nother half to it but it’s only one extra section that I need to put together, so I don’t know. Right now it feels short, but not every battle, npc, or item pick up have been placed in every section, only a few. Once I do that I can get a better idea.

If only battles stopped breaking!