back to work after a well deserved weekend rest. been having some quirks with my vision so i’m gonna have that checked sometime this week and take it easy.

not a whole lot happened outside playtesting but we finally fixed the quirks with the targeting system and the bossfight plays out as expected. now i gotta make it look prettier and do a couple of extra sequences. Looks like i was right and the whole thing was going to be ready by now! I need to do further playests to finally get around a bunch of long delayed tweaks.

setpiece done except for the actual fight and a game over cutscene, puzzles done with their respective cutscene this time for real. lots of playtesting, sound tweaking, bug fixing, and building the boss fight. Everything works so far, game didn’t break while i was working on the sequence. I’m really optimistic in that we will have this ready by sometime this or next week depending on the number of snafus. we got this!! vertical slice soon my dudes.

lots of playtesting and tweaking and fixing, kind of glad most of the things causing issues were oversights from forgetting to set up stuff correctly.

• fixed an issue where the item crafting wouldn’t reset properly
• added a cooldown after battles so the battle area doesn’t spawn again in the same place, making you fight over and over until you step in the right spot when it ends
• added missing signal receivers to several playable directors that were preventing me from making progress
• initial set up for the setpiece is complete, now we start designing the behavior for the midboss
• made a bunch of new cutscenes for the puzzle sequences

gonna keep playtesting for a bit longer after this then gonna try to go to bed early-ish. stuff is going very well, and i’m actually a nervous mess since we are nearing the point where the vertical slice will be ready enough to get feedback from others. Would have loved to do this earlier in development but i wasn’t expecting this game to be such a learning experience. I think that if we began making this game today with the stuff we know already about how to build it, we would have this year’s worth of progress in about two months or so… which in turn makes me excited for future projects !!!!!

tomorrow i’d like to both keep playtesting and design more characters, there’s a bunch i wanna get ready for a trailer.

made a victory animation and worked some more on the level, this time scrapping one of the most important rooms for something completely different and it looks really good so far!

newprogrammer has been working hard on the rest of the items and a lot of it needs playtesting. one of them being the victory sequence but apparently the game is breaking when a battle is over, so we gotta look into it.

i’ll likely work tomorrow and i want it to be mostly playtesting to further polish things, and then begin on some promotional artwork.

lots of long overdue stuff got done today and solved a bunch of worries regarding on-screen prompts for different platforms too. text mesh pro has inline sprites and that came in super handy, plus we settled with a very familiar iconography you probably see a lot on the switch.

doesn’t mean it’s gonna be running on switch (we can only realistically do this on pc because of our very small team) but this will be mad helpful for any controllers people can potentially have around.

overhauled the inventory a bit as well as polished other aspects of the UI while newprogrammer fixes many of the weird behaviors i’ve been seeing as of late in battles and during menu usage. fixed a thing with the item crafting (just a prefab that wasn’t correctly updated in my scene) and further worked on the set piece. the whole thing needs more playtesting but once i polish those rough edges i can start doing the cutscene with the midboss and give this a proper game over screen that’s not just the placeholder we have atm.

i really wanna finish this section of the level so i can use it as a private demo to get feedback. been holding off on letting others try it since so much relies on atmosphere (shit’s just as important to me as raw gameplay, capisci?) and while i can easily roll out a battle-only demo, battles aren’t my biggest worry, i know they are fun, but it’s my first time doing level design so the exploration has me on edge.

so apparently ludum dare starts in like a couple hours and i rather begin fresh rather than all beat up from work so i’ll just finish real quick.

good news is that i partially completed two more rooms and just need to add props. that brings the count to only two rooms left to finish this floor!

will go back to it after the weekend is done. gonna try to focus on two particular aspects: make battles look better (some effects broke by changing ps1 shaders), maybe integrate again a transition between exploration and combat, work on the cutscene for the midboss and stress test the item crafting feature that’s allegedly done but newprogrammer has been busy with n1rvanna.

that’d be all for this week!