A bit of a delay due to some personal problems but I’m back on the saddle. Current goal is to finish this current level by tomorrow by accelerating some of my process, then sketch the next one. It’s pretty much a sprint to have the entire game blocked out in the coming months and there’s a lot to do. Pretty excited about some story sequences and other cool details.

I think we’ll cut weapon crafting and simplify it with simple upgrades. Not due to any time consuming process, but rather that the game got to a point gameplay-wise where it’s simply more fun to focus on collecting and upgrading rather than mix and matching. But we’ll see! I haven’t decided yet.

Also, I worked on a jam game over the weekend. Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/xermatt-redux

Lots of progress on battles and the way they feel. Added more particle effects for hits, sound effects, all the good things. Continued work on the map I’m making for this chapter but stumbled upon some organizational issues when it comes to scene hierarchy and the like.

I almost had a heart attack due to that, since nothing was working well and the game fell like it was falling apart but it was a matter of properly organizing what I need for each scene and now I’ll build things based on that instead of the old guerrilla approach I was using. Made me waste a ton of time so tomorrow I have to pick up the slack and wrap up the initial layout.

There’s so much work ahead is not even funny, man. Hard to stay optimistic once it hit me. The sheer number of things I gotta do is quite insane but we’ll pull through.

It was a bit of a blackpilled week but it somehow ended on a good note.

We improved our prototyping speed and implemented new attacks for the player in a timely fashion (players can now use a melee-only build if they want!). Plus I’ve been having quite a bit of fun assembling the map for this chapter and I think it might be done sooner than expected. Again thanks to some key improvements we did to see results faster. Things feel less of a gamble and more of an entertaining set of experiments that no longer fuck the game up.

Next week is gonna be really cool as we add even more fun things to the battles while I assemble the current map. Story for this chapter was written a long time ago, and after some compromises to the format, doing implementation should be a matter of hours.

Sorry about the big gaps as of late. The combination of grind and general frustration about some designs not really working out in the expected ways has me quite worn down. By this time of the day all I wanna do is sit back and play Bloodborne.

It’s particularly frustrating because the combat we have is quite good and it will only get better; That part I’m so proud of. But I can’t, for the life of me, come up with a great loop. All the ideas we’ve prototyped are just boring, or I’m not experienced enough to pull them off and make it meaningful… It’s breaking my brain apart in ways I didn’t expect.

Like, not even copying the loop from other games is an effective strategy if I want to finish the project within my lifetime. The number of things I can do, and do well, is staggering. But none of those solutions will work in the short term. They’re investments that need to be done and require more manpower, experience, and a myriad of other things. It’s all stuff that I can’t realistically do by myself and one programmer in months time.

It sounds gloomy and spells doom at Sacrifice because it frankly is a grim scenario I’m facing. We’ve been in the process of downsizing in every possible aspect and I think what we have is attainable. It’s the actual gameplay loop that needs to be compelling and encourage players to see the full story.

I’m also worried about length, since the game needs to be at a certain price point for this to work and be profitable. I hate thinking in those terms like you wouldn’t believe, but such is life living in this fucked system. Art can’t proliferate if the artist doesn’t eat.

Work has been steady, though. Fucked up shit aside.

We’ve been working on the things we know are fun and can get better while writing and drawing level layouts. Discussing lore a fuckton over 5-hour calls, modeling props, texturing stuff… The usual grind. I think we have most of the game already written; at least the story, not the scenarios ’cause of the above issues.

This week I want to focus on giving the player more shit to do during battles and increase prototyping speed by adjusting some of our tools to require less steps to do simple things. Some of it is inevitable but a lot other can be better.

It’s one of those days where I think “man, if only I could do short games for the rest of my life and be happy”. You know, just doing whatever I want from a cabin in fuck-knows-where. Unbothered by life and people just enjoying my brand of shitty inconsistent art.

We’ll come up with something, and this will be one hell of a learning experience when it’s all said and done. Commercial and critical bomb or not. It’s just a matter of finding the sweet spot between ambition and reality. VA-11 Hall-A and every other small project was shipped successfully because they were all small from the get-go. This is legit the first time we set out to do something big, and boy, is it biting me in the ass now.

It will be fine. There’s always a solution for everything. All I need to do is escape the tunnel vision to see the light ahead.

Contrary to common belief, I have been working my ass off and totally not playing Elden Ring (I only took two days off for that!! and the weekends, I never work on weekends).

Most of the progress for the past few weeks has been focused on wrapping up the chapter we were making, fixing bugs, writing, designing, taking a hard look at the tools and see what can be improved.

Now after a huge scare regarding translations that drove the both of us to nigh physical deterioration, we managed to pull through and now we’re reevaluating the loop that ended up not being that fun after all. It’s only one dumb detail since the fixes are really easy to implement from a design standpoint, but not so easy to justify with the current lore so… yeah, big brain moments are needed. Such is the challenge of doing something that’s somewhat gameplay-first and we’ve never done something like that before at this scale.

All in all we ended up accomplishing a big milestone and once we clean up our tools we’ll start work on the next chapter in earnest. I’ve already began adapting my script to a flow chart, and sketching the first couple levels to test a new loop. Shit’s pretty fun so far and also advancing at an unexpected speed. Again, can’t give any sort of estimate but we’re getting there.

Now back to Elden Ring.

The chapter we were working on is virtually complete, but as I mentioned in the last log it will need some heavy tweaking once we go back to it. After careful planning I already know what to do, so that’s good.

This week we’ll focus on bug testing, do our first stable build, and generally just make things solid enough to update over time. Treat this as if this is an early access in order to update the base over time without breaking things.

There’s still a lot we gotta do to improve our current flow, but I’d say good work is being done so far.

Next in my list is to write one last bit of dialogue, then some concept art for a couple new characters for the other chapters.

Lots of work on the story sequences and fixing some quirks of the save system. That’s basically it. A big grind to get this thing done. Next on the list is a cutscene for the end of the boss fight, an extra environment, and a dialogue for the ending. Once we revisit this episode we have to add a couple scenes to give extra oomph to the story, but for now I’ll adjust existing conversations to make things a bit more sensical.

I’ve come to realize that making a story-focused game with like actual combat and shit is a bit like playing lego, where I get to swap pieces and include new ones to improve the story. I might have said something like this before but it’s something I think about any time we build an episode.

Here are some screenies I took while working on the cinematics.

Been avoiding writing stuff here due to my arm but it’s been feeling great for a long while now. I’m less scared of doing things with it.

Lots of work, mostly on the bug hunting department and polishing of the tools we have. Environments, UI design, playtesting. Aside from some hiccups with the save system and some other jank the game has now a solid 40 minutes of gameplay and that’s like… holy shit! The chapter would be finished by now if it weren’t for the aforementioned bugs but that’s a great signal. My goal has always been hour or hour and a half per chapter and it looks like we’ll make it.

I wasn’t exactly worried about the game being short, but rather that it didn’t have a compelling loop with a good rhythm and pacing that encouraged players to take their time and explore the maps at leisure. Well, now I know it does and the story ain’t bad either. All it needs is a good polishing pass once it’s complete and it will be a Video Game.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still lots to do. But with this chapter up and running the rest feels achievable within an acceptable time frame.

Medium and long-term goals:

>Code behavior for main bosses
>Code behavior for more enemies
>More items
>More weapons
>Models for characters
>More environments
>Polish and kill whatever bugs we see along the way

It’s very much just content creation whatever we have ahead. It’s great! With the story sort of already written, this thing feels very tangible. Just gotta pray for our current workflow to withstand the impacts of full production. Would be a shame if we had to rebuild the game again but at least this time my Plan C is quite good.

I hope it doesn’t come to that, even if it ain’t gonna be that painful.

I think I have to start using years in these titles now.

Made two new small environments. These are very fun to do since I already have a bunch of assets and modules for them. Plus they are not completely explorable – just a static camera is enough for what the players will do in these :0)

Newprogrammer is putting together the chapter using the scripts I did in December. Our current mission is to implement as much as possible by the end of the week. Might have to write a little.

I think I forgot to mention but here’s a game I made during my vacations. It’s short (20-30 minutes) but nice. I’m proud of it. There’s lot to learn about writing but I’m enjoying letting my mind go wild.

The Radio Wave Bureau

Didn’t update since my arm was killing me but I hope it’s fine now. I managed to grind somewhat hard today without issues.

Even then last week was all about planning and heavy playtesting. The weapon craft system is done, the story scripts we gonna implement are done, save and load ui are done. This week we’ll put all of the aforementioned scripts inside the game proper and see how far we get. Also took the chance to make more environments.

The following days will be very important in order to gauge if this is really the process we want in order to make the game. Fingers crossed for that one. If not, well, then we’ll have to rethink the story presentation and that’s gonna be a bit of a binch.