lots of work done, mostly on the cutscene and prop-making fronts. Today is a special day because it marks the first time I made a cutscene for an actual story sequence and not a test or anything, so I guess you could say the shooting on set has just begun.

So yeah, mostly cutscene stuff, adjusted some pending puzzle sequences with new assets, built the other side of the second section (pretty fast since i only need it to look good from one angle), playtested newprogrammer’s changes to the skill customization screen, and last but not least i did an early set up in fmod for the footsteps corresponding to different materials, we’ll integrate those once we finish more urgent matters.

tomorrow i’ll probably do more sprites for project X and work on more cutscene stuff since there’s quite a bit of planning i need to do before i work on preliminary animations (preliminary because i make the basic motions to then commission polished ones from freelancers, depending on the case)

Great start of the week, just hope my health is up to speed in the coming days.

damn almost forget to do my daily log.

big day today as we did a bunch of bullshit, namely fix stuff regarding skills, juiced up the grenade launcher, did new assets, particle effects, props, animations, adjusted some concept art so i can send it over to the 3d team. doesn’t seem like much when i’m writing it all in a single paragraph but it was probably one of t he busiest days i’ve had in a while, there’s just so much to do and we are pretty much going at high speeds right now.

kinda scary that things are going this fast but it’s also very exciting.

finished camera set up for most rooms along with the waypoints, arranged some props, made new rooms, and a metric ton of new icons for skills, accesories, items, keys, buffs, debuffs, as well as particle effects for the latter, and some other vfx for special bullets and impacts. I think tomorrow we will integrate the ui elements i did the other day, like the PSY bar and the altered states icons/counters, along with polishing the new accesories for the rifle – we made a grenade launcher for it in order to refactor and plan out future enhancements and make it all comfy.

tomorrow i’ll go back to drawing and touch up some of the concepts merenge made, along with finishing extra details for one of the characters and then send them for modeling. I also need to tweak a new animation for the grenade launcher.

Only two more set pieces + the boss fight and this level would be content complete.

now to shower, get nice food and play yakuza!

did a bunch of UI work for altered states, new icons for skills and actions, plus the long delayed character design on one of the remaining bosses (this took me most of the day). I’m not quite done yet but we are pretty happy with the results so far.

newprogrammer has been doing a deep refactoring of the skill system so we can add more later without much work. It’s one of the earliest things we ever did so naturally a bunch of code was unnecessary.

in other news i bought yakuza like a dragon so i’m sorry if this update is hastily written cause i wanna go back to it before i sleep.

lots of progress doing the usual tweaks and adjustments to the level so the doors and cameras work as intended. I mention this a lot, so it’s worth noting that this takes me a fair amount of time because the camera angles change depending of the room, so whenever i have to set up doors i also have to make sure they are triggering cameras and working properly.

also finished the room for the final boss fight of this chapter and it’s looking really cool. newprogrammer is implementing new skills for the player so we can make sure it’s comfy to add more later.

after all tweaks and stuff are done, we’d be two more setpieces away from finishing this one without counting a more through polishing of every aspect.

tomorrow i need to stop delaying the character design for a couple bosses. i already got some good ideas so that’s half the battle, now to actually draw.

i also need to draw more icons for the actions.

finished every section except the boss room, so monday i can either spend the whole day doing that room, or finish that one partially and focus on the story cutscenes while newprogrammer does the enemy integration. As i’ve stated before, being done or finished with parts of the map does not mean i stop working on them, they are merely textured, connected and lit close to the final vision, but are still lacking things like props, more texture variations, decals, stuff like that. The thing is that for me atmosphere is so important to the experience i need at least a preview of it. I realized i can’t playtest levels as grayboxes because unless it’s been carefully planned (it’s never carefully planned with me) i’ll always have that nag in the back of my head that i won’t know how to make stuff look nice after the flow is done.

it’s all about the learning experience… it’s my first time doing a commercial game that’s not a vn, so there’s a lot of growing pains. Next Game was supposed to be the game that made me go through this, but now once we are back to that one it’s gonna be both ready faster and better built.

anyway, that’s it for this week. Done with a lot of the grind and i’m pretty happy about it, so on monday we start with a lot of the fun stuff, like making new skills, attacks, neat augments that change battle parameters, new enemies, story cutscenes… The real project d starts now!

continued the grind but i lost so much time fixing a big problem i had with the lighting and the use of emissive materials, i almost even lose the progress i made yesterday with the new sections because i didn’t commit my changes last night… so yeah. Crisis averted though…

newprogrammer is still fixing some issues in the behavior for the boss, and his work yesterday looks great and battles have once again lots of juice. gotta fix an issue where they stay white after being hit.

god, i have no idea what will happen tomorrow cause i do have so many things to do and after the problems i ran into today i’ve been feeling like working extra hours, thing i would like to avoid. Maybe I should focus on connecting all sections and finish the third one before i go back to adjust all rooms and lore files to the new plan, cause that’s what i was about to do before looking at the clock.

lots of good work, especially on the new sections of the map. it is my wish to finish em up tomorrow at least partially and begin the content bits asap to begin the story cutscenes.

gonna keep this one short cause i wanna go to sleep.

things to do:

• fix lighting to avoid using emission materials
• reconsider if i want another lame hallway for the third section
• playtest newprogrammer’s work from today
• for fucks sake, finish the pending boss designs to send the batch to be modeled

preview of one of the bits i did today

this morning i made some really good progress on the other two sections, as i already know what i want and how to do it, mapped a lot of it, but had to visit the eye doctor after lunch and see if i had any big issues since i got some spooky symptoms, but everything came out fine except the doc applied these drops that turned me near sighted and photo sensitive until probably tonight… so those sections are gonna have to wait till tomorrow.

I feel really good though, nothing like confirmation from a professional that i’m indeed not going blind anytime soon.