Might have stumbled upon my least favorite part of level design: level design. While i enjoy the shit out of making things look good, i’ve realized i have a hard time coming up with the actual layouts for playable areas. While i’ll eventually find it fun, the growing pains sure are fucked. With this i mean to say that i blocked out the inside of the manor, which was a challenge in and on itself because manors are quite complex structures, even moreso when it has to be explorable, with areas large enough to host battles but also carrying the necessary detail to come across as lavish. It’s hard to explain, but the point is that my brain will need to accept the fact that stuff won’t look pretty inmediatly and sometimes i need to prioritize gameplay over looks. I’ll make it pretty once we settle on a good gameplay setpiece.

With that “done” I can move on to the last piece of environment work for File 03. This last one is quite complex, and all about looks for spolerific reasons. Once that’s done we can start with cutscenes and craft the encounters however fits best. It’s sort of terrifying but that’s why we completed a whole ass level beforehand! to get used to all the stuff.

On project X i made a new background, which i freaking love by the fact it’s starting to look like how i wanted valhalla to look. it’s hard to explain, but at the time i wanted an actual pc98 esque look, and while sometimes it has the feel, it still ended up modern (don’t get me wrong, i’m stupidly happy at how it turned out in the end). Now i’m kinda starting to break the code and I hope to keep improving!

Have a nice weekend, everyone.

more environment and background work. This time i might have stumbled upon a layout i’m happy with for the fancy place, which doesn’t look that fancy right now but i’ll move on and go back to it once i’m doing the cutscenes of that place, since it’s hard to land on anything solid until i know exactly the usage. Tomorrow then i’ll move to the interiors. Reminder to modify the size of the actual manor, might be too small.

On project X i made some final tweaks to the bg i was drawing the other day plus a new one that took me a surprisingly short amount of time. Need to research the areas of ships where they do the pew pew so i can do those tomorrow.

It’s crazy how i don’t enjoy drawing backgrounds in 2d, but since i began using the blender trick it all took a very cool and fun direction.

i’ll admit i didn’t do much today aside from tweaking some ui elements and gather references for the next scene on the list, which is rather complex for being a pretty fancy mansion and that’s something i’ve never done before. Made the layout, gathered a bunch of pictures, next is drawing a rough concept of how the interior looks like and then block it out in unity. I also playtested project X a bit and there’s some stuff to fix, mostly on the design side where the first rooms have to teach players how to play, and telegraph a bit more the tasks. Newprogrammer fixed an issue with transitions and scene loading for the objects holding main functions. Save system is done, what i saw of the skill tree an augment menus are done, so once he’s done with scene management we can start timeline managers, then new enemy integrations.

i did work last friday, i just couldn’t be assed to log my progress, too tired.

friday progress was all about wrapping up the entrance to a club, which proved to be a waste of time to do it all in blender since much of my tweaking is inside the engine when it comes to environments. Still looks good but past this entrance it’s already looking better and it doesn’t even have textures yet.

I shared it on twitter if you wanna see, though chances are you already follow me there.

Some environments I've been working on #screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/BsV6klajQo

— kiri (@kiririn51) February 6, 2021

today’s progress was quite thick, for i finished the sketch of a new poster, two new environments (the stuff past the aforementioned entrance), and finally figuring out a solid-ass workflow for project x’s backgrounds (different beast from what i’ve done before). Newprogrammer is now working on the asynchronic scene streaming for large levels but that shouldn’t take long. I need to playtest his progress tomorrow since i’ve been churning out environments without checking on his work which might be incredibly dangerous.

see you all tomorrow.

welp, i’ve caved in and worked until late to make up for a lost day (woke up late with my bad sleep, had to assemble a new chair while being a complete dummy at that kinda thing). Began work at 5pm and ended at 1 30 am, not proud of that and shoulda just taken then day.

as for work, newprogrammer is almost done with the save system, i need to go back to the save and load interface to make sure it meets his cool demands (he wants a screenshot of the game, playtime, chapter name, etc.) but that’s gonna be tomorrow. As for me, i’m continuing my blender experiments with project X to middling success. The program crashed on me several times making me lose some work, and the road to make them as stylish as the original prototype is gonna be painful but hopefully rewarding.

Finished a new scene in project D, not too happy with it! and might go back to the drawing board (mostly that i can’t find good camera angles, a sign of bad visual layout), but for now i’ll spear ahead with the next scene: a club.

Boy, I really really need my healthy sleep back, i’m feeling the consequences super hard. And sign up to that gym!!!

project X: finished room permutations and tweaked the main interface, now i gotta do generic rooms. Need to be careful with my render workflow since i already had some mysterious color inconsistency, but since the floor is already made i can just take that into account for the next batch.

project D: did a bunch of new parts for a rather large scene that’s gonna be half playable, half cutscene so it needs props that actually work as a level. Pretty fun, I already had a solid idea of what i wanted and tomorrow i’ll sit down and properly sketch the level, need to find references for large basements. Newprogrammer has been knee deep all week integrating a bunch of new code to the UI I made weeks ago, some bugs arised but we’ll properly address them later. Gotta come up with fun skills and augments.

Was able to start early, that means time to jump between projects. For Project X i finally came up with a rather funny way to churn backgrounds, but it took a bit of tweaking and i need to figure out the right workflow to keep consistency.

first i do a render in blender

then I draw on top and apply a dithering using a palette lookup.

It’s pretty fun, saves a lot of time, just gotta nail the right steps to produce many of them in a short time.

For project D i continued with the list of environments, this time a morgue scene that’s halfway done now, just need to do one more room with its props and textures. Had to put in some extra work with the waiting room for i wanted to visualize a particular style of “cinematography” before polishing further, pretty happy with the results.

That’s it for today.

pretty relaxed day just writing with newprogrammer, only one event is left to be outlined but chapter’s already neatly blocked out for the most part, and any change will be small and made on the fly during production. Gonna draw some concept art for it once it’s done. Been also outlining the rest of the episodes since we already had a very solid idea on how they should play out. Chapter 3 (the one we are working on right now) was made very haphazardly using some cool yet vague ideas, so it was complicated to get it right.

Took a bit to sketch out an inventory ui for project X too so I once again was able to work on two projects in one day. Very nice.

another day of good work, this time i managed to cram project x stuff which is on track once again after clarifying some confusions about how exploration works and preemptively finished some much needed ui elements.

aside from that i got my hands dirty once again in character design for a new character in the project D cast. Dunno if i mentioned this before, but for a lot of these designs i tend to do the face and hair, maybe some accesories and then merenge completes the design with a cool outfit, it’s been working out very well so far.

last but not least, i somehow wrote more of the game’s outline and tomorrow i’ll start detailing each chapter so our writer can help out figuring out the real meat. I’m glad that i’ve been able to write everything down so i don’t have to constantly pull things out of my brain on the fly.

Very productive, even if i still can’t go back to engine stuff quite yet.

so after all issues this week it feels good to finally have a day of just comfy grind without problem solving. Made a new dialogue, connected it with the previous one, finished the one from yesterday a bit more adding the missing characters, now i just gotta give em an animation pass, but that’s gonna be done later, likely after i’m done with the third and last section of the level. Sophie is designing the puzzles for that area. I think we can safely start that one on monday, so looking forward to that.

on project X i finished all sprite sets for one of the characters and i’ll be jumping to another on monday too probably.

Newprogrammer is integrating the altered states UI and vfx, and i’ll playtest them after the weekend is over.

Game progress going mighty fine, folks.