a bit of a disappointing day as i kept myself busy with the menu stuff and got stuck adjusting a single animation for far too long. Good news is that i might be somewhat done with it, and also made a new gun. Tomorrow i should focus on polishing some of the earlier rooms in the level so they are more consistent with the rest of the complex, or extra story cutscenes. There’s frankly a lot to do and it’s starting to feel a bit overwhelming, but it’s a matter of isolating each task and just do it, instead of thinking of what needs to be done.

Newprogrammer started working really late so not much progress on the boss battle, but he’s now integrating some leftovers of the battle ui and hopefully tomorrow we can work on the same hours as we’ve been doing for a long time now.

gonna finish a bit early today cause fridays kinda demolish me but also because i have to do some errands. good news is that i kept working on the new menus and shit, finished a ton of it and only one section remains, and it’s all looking great. taking more time than i expected but hey, games of this kind deserve well-made interfaces.

newprogrammer is still working on the boss while i help him playtesting it and it’s closer and closer to our vision. really great stuff overall and somehow an exciting battle despite the (currently) simple AI. Once we do like more phases and special behaviors it’s gonna be one for the ages.

see you all monday.

nice day, spent all working hours playtesting and doing the new UI stuff, including the title screen and character menu, which we already had but it’s simply not working for me and we have a disaster in our hands that needs to be changed. Newprogrammer spent all day working on the boss fight using a prefab and controller i set up yesterday and it already plays fantastic, next step is to polish each attack and then give it priorities, phases, and all the good stuff a boss fight should have. I’m really looking forward to it.

i’m not too much into fooball these days compared to when i was a lil kiddo, nor into maradona, but since i’m living in buenos aires at the time of writing it’s impossible not to notice the energy on the streets. Lots of demonstrations in the city’s center where i live.

on the game development front.. it was one of those days, something really stupid broke everything and we spent most of the day debugging, turns out it’s the way we handle the UI… i knew that one was gonna bite us in the ass, so we gonna revamp that along with the character menu once we are done with the boss. The good news is that we fixed all that and began the groundwork for said boss, and hopefully tomorrow we spend all day doing just that, so we can call this level complete (in the way i’ve been calling things complete. If you’ve been reading for quite a while then you know what i mean).

Alright that’s it for today, gonna get some milanesa and play maybe more yakuza or tetris effect.

a bit of a disappointing day as i spent way too much time fixated on one stupid thing but progress was made. i linked all cutscenes and sequences that lead up to the last underboss encounter, fixed a bunch of weird behaviors caused by misplaced nav meshes, polished one of the rooms, and new programmer improved the AI for the underboss, plus added a couple more timeline tracks and playables to make it easier for me to open doors and add items during cutscenes. There are some other bugs we fixed too, but there’s a weird one still there where the player character would go between different idle state animations before reaching the right one, might need to move around that blend tree.

with this done i think we can safely do the boss tomorrow, then polish everything else and add more enemies. Current goal is to have as much as we can by december 15… which is where our vacations start, and we won’t comeback till january 6.

pretty comfy day even if i began late because of housekeeping (didn’t do it on sunday cause i was kind of dying from a headache). Almost finished the third section, now i gotta do the second midboss encounter, then the actual chapter boss.

Future tasks for the short term:

new menu, this time for real with a bunch of fancy shit
character building stuff
more enemies
more skills, buffs, debuffs, altered states
title screen
loading screens
save system

feeling really great about this, game’s going super smooth barring the times we’ve had to put down fires, but overall ultra comfy. this is my favorite part of game development, actual content stuff! I’ll wait till i have more models before i cut a trailer/make a formal announcement, since i wanna showcase some of the bosses.

we solved everything from yesterday, including a new comfy method for animations during generic conversations that’s still just half way done but hey, at least it’s not fucking up the game massively to the point we have to revert back several commits anymore.

Because of said revert we had to do a bunch of things again, but i was able to do all of it pretty quickly and looking better than before the disaster. connected a bunch of cutscenes together and i can continue doing more tomorrow. Next we gotta fix a bunch of things for the battles (found a bug where players can’t move after they win if a cutscene played in the middle of an attack, among some other small details), and integrate the altered states huds, their particle effects and fix all all issues with weapon equipment and customization.

the lesson here is to never crunch. guys, if you are struggling to fix something and you won’t let go until you find out, you’re doing it wrong. I fixed half the issues this morning after a good night of sleep, same with new programmer. a fresh brain is a better investment of time vs the time you lose for doing bad code while tired and then fix later.

good stuff, bad stuff. ON THE GOOD STUFF i made a bunch of story cutscenes, and tomorrow i’ll make more. very productive day in this regard, and as i get more acustomed to the sequencing tools the faster the turnover.

On the BAD STUFF, battles broke again. we found the cause before i sat down to write this, but there are some issues with weapon equipment. stuff keeps breaking for absolutely no reasons and we really need to do some clean up to see what’s going on. Kind of unacceptable really.

Hopefully it all gets solved tomorrow.