Nice couple days just writing and designing quests. Wrote emails and I should probably write more stuff for the internet sections.

There’s a delay going on due to really pesky bugs that have been causing trouble for a while now. Grenades are still freezing the player and attacks weren’t dealing any damage either. The latter turned out to be a weird behavior with colliders that took nearly a day to figure out (gotta love that kinda stuff…)

Tomorrow I’ll keep building game stuff while newprogrammer continues with the boss fight. Still ways to go but this chapter feels nearly done. Might have to chill with the cutscenes.

Slept a bit better. Finished preliminary work on animations and visual effects for the boss battle while newprogrammer fixed the bug from yesterday. We both managed to finish all of that today so now tomorrow we start with the behaviors and the rest of the story sequences. Shit’s gonna rule.

I wanted to post a gif but I want the design to be a surprise.

Started work on this chapter’s boss but didn’t get to finish as many things as I wanted. Haven’t been sleeping very well so it’s affecting my concentration big time. This might continue for the rest of the week.

Also helped playtesting and found a really bad bug where players become frozen after throwing a grenade to enemies that are in the middle of certain attacks. Other than that everything is working as intended with the new info window and other tweaks I mentioned last week.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with the rest of the boss’ moveset and depending on the complexity of its behavior I might be playtesting that battle by friday or maybe monday.

Once work on the boss is done on my end (hopefully tomorrow) I’ll go back to cutscenes. Once we wrap up both things we’ll be exporting the first stable build of the game. After that comes localization tools, then a new chapter.

With this i’ve pretty much identified the amount of work needed for the rest of the game and I’m glad to say it’s very tolerable.

On my end it boils down to the following work per chapter:

• Roughly 3 new maps
• Visual effects, animation and some modeling for two new enemy types, plus a boss. Includes concept art if it’s not something I drew already
• Scenario writing and cutscene creation (both with the dialogue system and more elaborate ones with Timeline)
• Playtest the shit out of every aspect
• Some mild sound design

Sounds like a lot. IT IS frankly a lot for one dude, but this is bearable. Way more than with the previous design that added at least five more time consuming tasks. As development continues I’ll be able to re-use more stuff, making things go faster.

Getting there!

Yesterday I had a bit of a writer’s block so I did some environment work while newprogrammer was implementing new skills the player. I tested them today and they work alright except for a couple glitches. Noticed we needed a tooltip (sketched that one just a bit ago) and make the window go away after use so players don’t get confused.

Also today I wrote quite a bit inside the game and made whole new conversations that weren’t in the original script. Turns out writing based on the game scenarios is way comfier. Who woulda thunk???

Speaking of game scenarios: It’s something I actually never thought much about until now. In Va11halla I definitely thought of designing the game around “set pieces” like drinking with Dana and whatnot, but when it came to the normal gameplay loop I never had any concrete things I wanted players to do or go through since the goal was to have natural conversations with unchallenging gameplay in the middle. Some people loved, some hated it but that’s how it ended up.

With this one I’ve found myself coming up with scenarios first, then write around them. I now think in terms of “What do I want players to do?” which is interesting and makes me wonder in which ways N1rvanna will be benefitted from such mindset.

Things like this make me realize I’m essentially learning how to make games again, just from the genre shift.

Food for thought.

Writing this quick since I’m watching Dynamite.

Newprogrammer already has a preliminary version of the skill interface but has to fix a couple visual quirks before adding more to it. Namely targets not updating in the AoE preview.

I continued my work polishing cutscenes and modeled another character. Wrote some more dialogue that led me to a better idea for the scenario than what I initially did on paper so that’s really good.

All day modeling some props and characters I needed in order to polish the cutscene I’m also working on. Said cutscene is mostly finished, aside from some sounds and one more character that needs to be completed. I’ll get on that tomorrow.

Started to plan out more skills for the player and settled with a sub-menu function newprogrammer is gonna prototype tomorrow. At first we wanted a hotbar to handle skills like an MMO but since a lotta spells and such require you to preview the area of effect we might end up scrapping it for a fixed set of icons that activate different menus displaying all sorts of tools for combat. From items to healing skills.

None of this is final quite yet and has to be tested, but it’s one of those things we tried very early on but not as much as we should have – you can thank not knowing what the fuck we were doing with the game scenarios for all that time not spent playtesting combat.

In the middle of all of this the subtitle system for cutscenes broke, but thankfully we were able to patch it up relatively fast. It was sadly still time consuming.

Pretty good day overall. Tomorrow we continue working on those player skills and polishing the story sequences. I’ll need to write a lil bit too since the new design requires a more thorough approach for each scenario. Nothing especially hard to do, just… well, brain consuming!

Began the day working on particle effects and their timing during attacks. Actually a pending task from last week but I didn’t do crap on Friday.

I like it.

Here’s a snippet of how the combat looks at the moment after newprogrammer implemented my crude vfx.

This is a test room where we have fun fighting permutations of enemy groups. The idea is to go for quality vs quantity and design each enemy as unique as humanly possible so every encounter has a different strategy even if you’ve faced the same foes in other occasions. Lots of focus is going towards readability as well.

You guys know I love Parasite Eve and gameplay-wise is pretty much the template, but something that always bugged me about it was that some foes were really hard to read; both because the animation work was on the rougher side with almost no anticipation and battles being generaly static due to the limitations of pre-rendered environments. Here we did our best to avoid those sorts of trappings and I think we’re on the right path.

Still lots to adjust but we’re near a level of polish that makes me very comfortable. Next is player skills once we iron out a bunch of things that bother me. Chief among them is the weird timing for the melee attack visual effect; It happens before the model does the animation.

Dude with the sword thingie also has the habit of hitting me instantly after shooting them, as if it was resuming an a canceled attack but the damage was received well after the animation ended so that’s gotta be adjusted.

With this more or less done on my end I’ll focus on the story sequences again and see if I can polish most (if not all) of them by the end of the week.

Polished a couple story sequences, added extra sounds and adjusted some particle effects so they can be easily telegraphed by the player. Playtested a bunch and stuff is looking really good after newprogrammer quickly changed the awkward behaviors I was looking at.

The enemy I was talking about yesterday was fully implemented very quick and just gotta adjust some legibility issues with melee attacks. Might have to tweak some of the animations at a later date too.

With this mostly done we wanna focus on implementing more skills for the players to use. So far enemies have a lot of ways to kill you but players at the moment are only limited to using fire arms. Can’t wait to get to that.

More work on enemy types. Me and newprogrammer have been focused on pretty much just that and we are almost done with a really cool range-focused foe. One of the attacks remind me of the early days of this log when we were doing the first batch of prototype enemies. The gif was an area of damage of sorts (sorry, I really don’t know the usual naming conventions for these. I just do em’). I’d go back and look for it but I realized I suck at properly tagging and archiving these. It’s probably on my laptop but I’m not getting up until I write this (I’d get distracted and forget).

Tbh a lot of this is me creating Frankenstein monsters with existing particle from Unity and tweaking animation packs with UMotion Pro. It’s nice enough to quickly do stuff that also looks sorta good… just in case we gotta ship and run outta time. Good looking placeholders = shipped game. Worked with Valhalla! (I will never tell what was a placeholder and remained inside the game).

This is one of the models I was talking about by the way. Just the more outstanding shapes and colors! That way I can polish them at a later date while making sure they fit the game screen and are readable.

Might take friday off if my neck is still stiff. It was good for most of the day but I never know how i’m gonna wake up tomorrow.