finished the chapter 1 script and did some weird adjustments to one of the canvases, which is apparently preventing buttons from being pressed? but once I committed the changes it still didn’t work, so that’s weird. Monday I have to give the new tools a test drive.

Gonna keep this one short.

Almost done with the script of chapter I (with this I’d have 3 scripts done), and newprogrammer has a rough version of the new dialogue system already running on a cool node graph framework we found. Will go on detail as soon as we test it thoroughly.

Really exciting times. With that tool allowing for hyper-fast cutscenes/sequences it’s very likely I can actually use all the dialogue I’m writing right now. My scripts so far use very few new places per chapter; maybe one or two while the rest take place in the usual recurrent scenes.

Cool shit all around.

Worked some more on the script today, and it was a generous chunk although I might have written myself into a corner. It’s possible I’ll have to wait until I can fully prototype a chapter before I write more or I’ll end up having to trash a bunch of words that were very hard to write, lol.

Also did some concept art for a new boss and the shape their story took has been a very interesting one.

It’s gonna be a fascinating couple months as I try to wrap up the whole plot of the game. I can’t seem to settle for a single style but will likely have to choose one very soon due to time and money constraints. This game is bigger than I initially thought…

Finished a bunch of remaining ui screens for the player’s room. Can confirm it will have its lil internet thingie like in Va11halla because lil internets for lil games are always awesome. It’s something I can’t live without. I’d show some screenshots but the placeholders I included might give peeps the wrong impression.

Tomorrow I’ll be working on character design since I came up with a cool concept today and hopefully start writing again.

I decided to take a break from writing on this blog since a lot of it was just redundant tasks. For those wondering, I did have better sleep since the last time I wrote.

We also made gigantic progress on every front. Battles work great, finished a bunch of pending features, learned more shader tricks, set up a bunch of environments, and even got time to spare to work on some merch coming soon. Current tasks include integrating the game’s flow and scene management with a node graph along with creating simple sequencing tools to support the already existing process in Unity’s Timeline. It’s a combination of a simplified dialogue system separate from Timeline for really quick interactions and dialogues, and consolidating extra steps I used to make while crafting cutscenes into a single Timeline clip for faster turn over.

Last but not least, I’m midway through the first chapter’s writing but I haven’t had a real chance to sit down and keep working on it, or else it would already be done.

That’s all for today. Can’t say for how long I’ll keep skipping days but I should still attempt to keep up with the tradition, since I like to remember the things I do in any given day even if same-y.

I didn’t sleep 8 hours. In fact, I slept 4 and a half…

Tweaked the look of the battles a bit. Some enemies occlude the target graphic so i gotta figure out what’s going on there. I also wrote some more but with this struggle to get good sleep, and now my neck being extremely sore, trying to concentrate on writing words is harder than ever. Do I need a break, perhaps? I really don’t think I do, considering I often simply don’t do shit when the body asks for help but maybe it’s not enough? If sleeping 8 hours today doesn’t solve THE PAIN then I’ll consider a break. For now, gonna go to bed early and pray for the best.

Newprogrammer finished the first version of the shop, so tomorrow I should prooobably finish the hub just to have it there.

News soon on something we’ve been delaying for years. It’s not game-related but still really nice. Stay tuned.

Today was all UI work doing finishing touches plus the new target graphics I’ve been procrastrinating on and it looks pretty good! not even finished but newprogrammer already has it working just fine. Did the menus for changing places and even brought back the subtraction fade that I couldn’t use anymore without the ps1 shader. Now it’s a canvas element which in theory should lend itself to less disaster. It’s a simple black sprite with a blending mode.

I planned to write for what was left of the day but I’m… not sleeping very well, so i was already mega fatigued by like 4 pm. So short term goal is to sleep more during the night so I can work better (I don’t even stay up by my own will, I just roll on bed for hours until it’s morning).

Tomorrow newprogrammer will implement shops and crafting menus, then some last minute adjustments to the character menu (we’ll likely get rid of the skill tree like I said yesterday). Revamped dialogue system after that.

Here’s hoping for a good 8 hours of sleep tonight.

Sat down with newprogrammer and outlined the final final final features for real and what we call “gameplay modules” to easily separate the bits that are part of the loop. For a quick example you could say the store, bar, shooter mini game and room in va11halla are four different modules, so that’s what we wrote down for project D. It’s yet another thing we had to do like a year ago but had to learn along the way. As these updates prove, it’s not the first time we’ve outlined a list of features before realizing we didn’t account for X or Y. It wasn’t until we finished that huge level months ago that it became way easier to pinpoint our needs and that’s what we’ll seek to fulfill in the coming weeks with this plan already set in stone.

After that we began wrapping up some pending tasks, like the interface for shops and weapon crafting, juice up some particle effects, get rid of some jank in the battles, add the game over again and other similar bits and bobs.

I’m now writing more of the first chapter while newprogrammer takes care of planning out the new dialogue system (well, not that new, more like consolidating old features into one comfy package). Once that’s cool we do shops, interface to jump between scenes and the manager to control how the game loop works.

I might get rid of the skill tree in favor of a more straightforward skill upgrade system.

Right now i’m going thru a sort of a writer’s block but i’m slowly getting out of it after chilling just enough to get the juices flowing.

Now I’m tired and need some sleep. See you guys later.