You know what my favorite thing in game development is? Wasting a whole day troubleshooting something. With favorite i meant less favorite.

The thing is that so far two off-the-shelf shaders have been giving me a lotta static. There’s the popular psxeffects or whatever it’s called that shits the bed quite bigly for mysterious reasons, then there’s flatkit that outright breaks unity for some reason. And look, i’m not gonna blame the devs, it could very well be our fault, but one thing is certain and that thing is… they gotta go! so i’m now not using any ps1 tricks or any of that stuff, not for the time being anyway. I could rollback any moment now because it’s not that hard to switch between visual styles outside color tweaks, but right now i wanna focus on a workflow that’s not going to betray me while we work on the meat and potatoes. So, for the environments i’ll just be using the bakery standard shader for better results with the precalculated lighting and realToon for the characters.

The results so far are pretty great.

I made a quick normal map for her textures just to check how it looks. Gotta adjust some bits here and there but i dig it.

A couple folks mentioned this is now looking like a psp game but frankly i don’t think i’m targetting a strict look from any console or era, i’m just doing (as always) what i think works best with the story that i want to tell, and for cyberpunk the game must look crusty as hell, be 3d or 2d. It’s gotta look dirty or it doesn’t feel cyberpunk for me.

Anyway, aside from these visual tweaks and the set up for the blank project we are using now i’ve also been knee deep adjusting some lore details before diving into the next chapter’s script. I’m debating whether i should do chapter 2 or 5 since they both have interesting challenges i’d like to tackle but i’ll see tomorrow.

I wish we could go at the same pace as late last year. Maybe we are and we just don’t know but so far it feels like we are dragging our feet super hard. I did finish two whole-ass scripts though, that’s a massive amount of work but my brain probably registers it as nothing cuz i’m always sitting and writing on the computer at any given time.

Anyway, catch you tomorrow if i update.

Chapter 4’s first draft is complete. Took less time due to having this one planned rather well and it having more gameplay meant writing less dialogue but it still came out pretty good. I need to develop some things i left hanging and do a consistency pass now that i’m finding out what the game is about (don’t ask).

Newprogrammer and I decided to migrate to another version of unity from a clean project since we basically lost control of what’s fucking up the game in mysterious ways, so we’ll be rewriting and carefully migrate scripts. Only the ones we use and are absolutely vital. Dunno how long this is gonna take but i’m not worried, since I have to write 4 other chapters. My goal is to complete the game’s story by the time the migration is complete and fully functional. I’ll be adding that to my daily tasks though, since I gotta migrate a bunch of things myself and set things up in a clearner way. I might do away with the ps1 stuff but i’m still undecided on that front. I want the game to look retro and pixel-y but certain things with the ps1 workflow is massively fucking me up (transitions break, the post processing is funky, and a plethora of etc.), and it’s making me think that kinda style doesn’t work for a large project but who knows, maybe we are that incompetent.

More writing work. I’m going surprisingly fast with this chapter, though this one does have less dialogue than the other one by virtue of having more gameplay bits. Pretty excited to see where it leads since i already had to change one ending because the characters evolved in a way i wasn’t expecting. Lovely stuff all around.

dunno if it’s a fluke but i woke up at semi-normal times (5 am or something like that) and worked just fine on the new script. It’s chapter 4 and since i already had it well-planned i’m going at a rather speedy pace and managed to write around 20 pages of it. I also sent the previous draft to a couple friends who are giving me some valuable-ass feedback so there’s that.

Newprogrammer is fixing some nasty bugs i found during testing but one remains mega obtuse to replicate. In essence, the player shoots and doesn’t hit the enemy even if the trayectory is clear, and then proceeds to shoot a couple more times to varying degrees of success even if there are no more attacks left in the queue.

Hopefully it shows up again next time i fire it up to find out what’s causing it.

alright, script for chapter 3 is done, fucking finally and i really like how it turned out. the team is going over the contents and i’ll get to fixing once they give me that delicious feedback. Only one more place is needed when it comes to modeling but that’s fine. Now i have to review a bunch of fixes newprogrammer did over the week that he posted in the trello board. Now if you guys excuse me i have some empanadas waiting for me, i’m hungry.

almost done with the script, if everything goes well the first draft will be ready tomorrow since i only have to extend a few scenes and write the ending. been a longer journey than expected… as you guys know my mood for work hasn’t been the best, but i’m determined to push forward at a pace where i can do it safely until i can go full gear again. I’m really excited with how things are turning out. Slow but steady wins the race.

Went back to writing and things are going very well, i was able to go back to some of the earlier bits and change around some parts that didn’t make much sense anymore or were redundant, but it’s gonna be an interesting experiment to see how much of this is gonna make it into the game since i’m looking at a lot of dialogue, and if possible i would like a ratio of gameplay to story to skew in favor of gameplay. What I want to say is that once i start putting this one together i’ll have a better idea of how much dialogue i need to write for future chapters.

newprogrammer is feeling better after new medication and a couple visits to the doctor and he’s been fixing more bugs with enemy behaviors that i need to playtest tomorrow. A couple tasks arose, such as a scene selection menu inside the game to better debug scenarios and a cleaner, more generic character controller without battle logic for downtimes. Maybe this could lead to a clean overall exploration (code-wise).

Gonna keep writing and then start new portraits for project X. I’m close to having all characters done so i can focus on backgrounds and cg’s.