I’ll say february was also a little slow cause the programmer spent two weeks… here in Argentina! We finally hung out irl after four years of not seeing each other in person and man, it was fun as hell. We still “soft worked” during the first week and finished chapter 4. Working in person is so good and fast.

Like… working from home is great, but nothing beats having that instant feedback of having your buddies in the same room… plus listening to music, cracking jokes and consuming copious amounts of junk food adds to the vibe. I really missed this.

Alas, he’s back home now and we’re back on the saddle wrapping up pending tasks.

At the moment there’s a ton to do but it’s features and fixes we never properly decided what to do with, so it poses a bit of a pickle here where we could make those additions… but for what purpose? They were written as rough ideas that could work to solve some issues, but the design doesn’t support them yet.

This conundrum made us go back to the drawing board on some things then; mostly related to weapon skills and decided that the best way to go about it is to design fun enemies that have fun ways of defeating them. This will allow us to focus only on tools we know we’re going to use in combat and other situations.

It’s already fairly close to what we were doing, but we were also making the mistake of creating content (such as items, weapons, some dialogues, etc.) in a vacuum to implement later that didn’t really solve any design problems, add to the experience or were used at all, so we’re changing the way we go about it.

The end result should be a lean game with mechanics and moments that only add and don’t feel like bloat or are useless. It’s our hope anyway and we’ll find out soon. Obviously no game is perfectly balanced, but we want to give players viable ways of having fun.

Not much else to say. There’s a lot to do so I should go back to work now.

I spent a month in Japan. While not everything went according to plan I had a great holiday and accumulated a number of body injuries in the middle of heavy partying and bear encounters (real) that still haunt me to this day. Mostly my knees…

But it was worth it. The memories are invaluable; even if I’d like to forget making an ass out of myself at a certain bar.

I arrived in Argentina on the 9th, but didn’t start working until a couple days later. And even then not in full capacity, as I had to attend to a number of things before going back in the saddle. So really I kinda worked half a month.

Lots of important progress though. Especially in the UI department as we needed a new menu to support the introduction of a new mechanic.

On the right path

I accumulated a ridiculous amount of feedback while in Japan (and also during my trip to gamescom) that, while positive and encouraging, made us go back to the drawing board on certain parts of the game (don’t be scared; it’s nothing fundamental).

But significant how? Well, I saw way too many people get lost in the first map and it’s not even a complicated layout. They’d also get stuck in difficult battles because the build is old and you still lose all your money upon death (we fixed this), so even if they knew how to upgrade the mc they can’t cause they don’t have money, and this caused players to bruteforce encounters that would otherwise be fairly easy if they buy a skill or two.

This leaves us with the following priorities in the short term:

• Balance the game around nudging players towards collecting and using skills and different weapons for difficult encounters, and communicate somehow to players that brute forcing battles will make them write a negative review on steam and nobody wants that.
• Make problem solving not easier, but comfy to keep track of. Information in this game sometimes goes by too fast, so when players find a key they need for some door they have a hard time remembering which door has to be opened. This must be corrected.

Most of this will be tweaking numbers and adding visual cues to triggers, but some things will require a couple more complex things such as giving enemies more ways to react to your attacks, unique weak points and generally make them more interesting to approach without turning every encounter annoying. It’s tough, but I think we can do it. It sounds fun to do, since nothing really breaks the mold of what we have and that’s an important thing I’ve learned during these trips: The game is fucking cool as is, and it’s only gonna get better as we polish the rough edges and spice up the battles.

Now, the UI stuff is almost done. I still need to properly playtest it but I’ll do so once I finish the required scenes for chapter 4. I’d like to do that this week and I don’t think it will happen but I’ve done crazier things. If we finish chapter 4 in February (as in, areas all grayboxed but with all the logic and dialogues and progression already included) that would leave us with the last three, that by nature of the story will be much simpler to make from a level design perspective.

Not that they will be rush jobs; it’s just what the story commands. It will make sense, I promise.

And that’s where we are right now, and aside from all that I mentioned, our more explicit plan is to simply keep grinding content and polish whatever needs to be polished. We’ll also be subtracting things we don’t need, or that make the game harder to work on.

We’re in no-bullshit mode. This game will ship sooner rather than later, and then we’ll make more awesome games applying what we’ve learned.

Some thoughts

I do wanna talk about how I feel about announcing this game for real.

We’ve been working on this for years in the shadows. Most people who follow us don’t know anything about it, or about this blog for that matter. I’ve been talking about it in such a non-committal way as if to minimize the impact of a possible cancellation of the project.

And that’s pretty much because of what happened with N1rvannA; a game we knew we could easily make within the time we gave ourselves to work on it. But shit happened, we missed our target, and private matters took precedence over the game’s development. Anything can happen between an announcement and the completion of a project.

So now I have this wound about announcing things. It’s a wound and it still hurts to this day. Life is too unpredictable, and who the hell knows what’s gonna happen whenever I’m like “THIS GAME EXISTS, WISHLIST NOW”. I could die in a plane crash or some shit and then that’d be another game in an ambiguous state of release.

Sucks to see life in this way but that’s how I feel right now. Maybe it will change later this year once we present the game at a certain event we submitted for, but even then I’ll only feel safe once the game is ready to be sent to QA and localization.

Or maybe I’ll announce it because it’s terrifying. Because I want to win that particular battle instead of playing it safe.

Time will tell.

What I do hope is that people can one day be as excited for this as they are for N1rvannA and can feel assured they’ll play it soon. I know Project D isn’t the game you lot are actually hyped for (or hyped at all), but as of today this is the main thing. It will be the game that will define Sukeban nearly a decade after Va-11 Hall-A (for the better, I hope). There’s a self-imposed standard I want to achieve and I’m confident we’ll get there.

It’s gonna be a new world, new characters. New concepts and mechanics and gameplay and visuals. It will be the result of a superhuman effort to tell a story that must be told.

And it’s scary. I don’t know if it’s gonna sell well or even talked about. But if life was all easy mode then why the fuck live at all.

El que tenga miedo a morir, que no nazca.

Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t sad here. I’m fucking determined bruh.

We’re making something special; whether the world is ready for it or not.

Heh, I talk about finishing chapter 3 so nonchalantly but blocking out and filling levels with content is such a challenging thing full of constant testing and iteration that I’m shocked at the speed we did it. It also marks the beginning of the second half of the game which contains my favorite setpieces and aesthetics of the story so I’m looking forward to all that.

Not a lot else to report since the game is mostly set in stone and work has been a grind towards content completion. There’s one major change we’ll introduce that will need a rebalance, but that’s just changing stats…

Speaking of said major change: It’s weapon swapping.

Previously the game had you changing guns only during the pause menu. It gave the game a certain pace, but not a very entertaining one. Plus a lot of encounters would benefit from having very particular loadouts so it made sense to do this.

I think my main gripe with the previous system was that we were communicating the player a sense of commitment. That they should pick a particular weapon and stick to it to the end, upgrading it all the way. But since the combat was designed around mixing up different skills and styles it was a no-brainer to introduce this change.

Doing a one weapon run should still be possible, but very challenging…

By far the most annoying part of this is redoing the character menu, but that’s something we’ll deal with in due time.

We really hate working UIs in Unity lol… our next project will have very minimal UI for sure. Which is a shame because I like designing that kinda stuff as you probably know judging our past games, but I’m willing to make the sacrifice.

Short term goals: Finish this weapon swapping deal with a finalized UI and properly communicate players this. Character menu overhaul. Finish the 4th chapter.

This will have to wait until January though cause I’m taking my December vacations; this time in Japan.

I’ll see you all next year!

We managed to do most of what we set out to do in the short term, though we’re behind on the bigger fish we wanted to catch by December. There’s still a chance it happens but it’s unlikely; especially since we won’t be working for most of December (me and the programmer are going on a holiday. Gonna hang out irl for the first time in years). If we wanna get into specifics… well, it was an adventure.

So one of the bigger reasons shit got slow, aside from my well being, was that I realized I was spending whole days adjusting very little parts of the level.

It became obvious with this one because it’s mostly indoors and filled with little hallways and shortcuts… as opposed to the previous one that’s simpler and filled with outdoor scenes that are sort of easier to manage, as it avoided for the most part having intertwined geometry where one wall was also another room’s wall and so on.

Something had to change. Probuilder is great, but for blocking and iterating quickly on a large map it actually kinda sucks.

With Probuilder everything is destructive. If you open a hole in a wall it’s gonna stay that way and if you wanna edit something you’ll have to do it all over again. Not optimal at all. And it gets worse when I have to manage so many objects to the point where if I want to make changes it means a wall will now be clipping into the floor above, or accidentally make things too small and the player can’t get through a door. Fixing these issues would take me a looooong time, so I looked for something better.

Enter the magic of CSG-based level design tools.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I learned level design using Probuilder. I didn’t have experience making stuff for Quake or Half-Life or anything of the sort, so this was my first time giving this method a shot.

Made me feel like motherfucking Piccolo taking off the heavy cape.

CSG is short for Constructive Solid Geometry. Without going into much detail, it allows me to carve rather clean geometry that’s easy to manage and edit without worrying about messing things up. If I want something changed I simply move it around.

This is all old school stuff that I knew about but didn’t think much of until I got tired of the struggle.

The result is a rather big and complex level compared to the previous one; made with staggering speed at that. At least for me.

Only issue is that the editor is fucky sometimes but I’ll live. Probuilder fucks up too, and Unity itself as well. I basically work with broken tools all the time. It also makes levels look very Quake-esque so I need to watch out for that… been proud of the organic feel of my maps and I’d hate to lose that.

So yeah that’s why I’m so optimistic when it comes to finishing levels and the game’s content. Feels like we hit a stride in production not just because of this tool, but by improving the way we approach milestones and an assortment of bottlenecks.

As for what’s going on with me, I like to avoid talking about personal stuff since that ain’t nobody’s business, though I have to admit that running out of outlets to rant is getting to me. I’ll say it was related to mental health, wrist pain and a whole lot of frustration on some other things in my life.

This month we would like to finish the third level, or at least have as much as we can before we hit the road. The previous plan was to have level 4 ready by mid december but that’s going to be very hard so I’m no longer counting on it, and I don’t wanna work while I’m out there in the wild.

Next year’s gonna be crucial as we aim to be content complete. Not gonna give a public timetable since there’s so many aspects of the game that we have to balance, but things are still looking up.

Pretty sure that was the aim for this year too, lol… but we were working in a slightly different way last year, plus I had a host of issues preventing me from working as much as I wanted.

Omake:

In order to quickly learn to use the new tool, I created an empty project and started to fool around during a whole weekend. Dunno if I’ll make something out of this but the time I spent on it felt like state of trance. Just me jumping and walking around. Iterating and learning. It was fun; even if it was super simple.

I love to experiment and the excitement of pushing my skills in different ways, so it sucks I can’t get more of that rush due to a certain black cloud looming over my head. It makes it hard to freely show off what I’m doing outside of this journal, and can’t help but feel very jealous of the cool things I see on Twitter all the time from devs without the baggage I created for myself.

Maybe one day I’ll get to join that fun again.

This month I also worked another Ludum Dare with my good friend Chris. click on the picture below to play it.

It somehow won #1 in visuals so we must be doing something right.

I achieved the goals I set for the project in the last log, so we finalized what happens between missions and the extra dialogue that the new level needed, plus I began working again in earnest on the new level and have been tweaking and adjusting everything I see that’s a little off. Plus balancing.

I fully admit I almost lost a day of work because of the Unity shit that happened weeks ago but still ended up working my ass off later that night lol. It was not fun but hey, we’re already too far into this to do anything about it.

Doesn’t feel like we did a lot but looking back makes me realize that progress has been super steady. Could be better but I won’t complain.

Slightly worried at the amount of moving parts. Feels as if all learning resources for Unity taught us badly on purpose as a joke, and managing the size of the game has become tricky. There’s still more clean up that we should do but I’ll worry about that when I’m done with this new map.

Short term goals for this month include finishing this map including boss fight dialogues and cutscenes, a partially finished kit for the environment, and set up for the next level (planning of two new enemy types, the boss fight, and a revision of the existing draft).

I’m not gonna pretty up this map until I feel comfortable with the flow. In fact, every map will be really ugly moving on so we can reach content completion early next year. If we can finish map 4 in December we’ll be en route for just that.

Omake:

I was working on this scene and noticed the characters looked hella odd; as if they were tiny lil dudes. Likely because of the gigantic bottle?

Well I said fuck it and made everyone bigger. Game development is weird like that.

Standing up they look HUGE.

Dinner with Reila.

On August 20 I went on a little 2-week vacation trip that included a stop at Gamescom in Germany. Met a bunch of incredibly cool people that also happened to give project D a spin and the praise was abundant.

Thank you so much for your time!

Not gonna lie, that shit almost made me cry of happiness. Working on a game for so long in a vacuum affects the mind in a way I wasn’t expecting, so hearing what they had to say about it made the entire journey worth it.

It’s very much a gamble, and this one is seemingly paying off, but I wouldn’t do it again.

Next time I’ll be asking for feedback as early as possible, lol.

Before I boarded that plane, though, we focused on making the current build as stable as possible, as well as implementing every weapon in the game. Changed some of the introduction bits to be cooler too, as well as some light balancing.

I think the largest headache was a save issue where the game was refusing to keep records of everything but the player position in the level, but at the end it was a typo and the game works fine again. Funny that it happened just as I was prepping for the travel though.

Now that I’m back I’ll be taking things a little easier. Just had a call with the programmer to plan the rest of the week and share the notes I took on the road. So, not a whole lot of hard progress today as we decide what to do.

My short-term goal at the moment is to establish the final look and feel of the intermission sections, so they are snappier and serve a larger purpose. And resume work on the second level (pretty much start polishing what’s in there). There’s some dialogue I need to write too, but not too much.

That should be it for now. Looking forward to what the rest of the month has in store for us!

So funny thing right: I was writing some dialogue and all of a sudden I asked myself “what the fuck am I even looking at” and realized I was mega lost in this story that I myself wrote and even documented in a wiki so this doesn’t happen… and it still happened, so I pulled back a bit and made a list of the elements that actually matter and tweaked the first level to feature as few characters as possible. This helped greatly since I was able to wade through the noise and feature the parts that I considered relevant, and whatever addition will be there because I deemed it to be key for the game’s story or its fun/mood/vibe factor.

So not really a rework of anything, mostly tweaking how I present what I already have and when. Some things that happen in chapter one got either bumped to chapters 2, 3 and 4, or got cut, or turned into something else. It feels great to have a game so modular I can simply change when players get certain story bits to make things interesting.

It’s been fun to also adjust the draft of the script as I implement the text. Allows me to grab very rough dialogue and turn it into something special while retaining the intent. It’s an obvious product of proofreading and editing etc. but since I myself am looking at the dialogue on screen with visuals and music I can adjust it on the fly so it hits better. Hard to explain, but even then this isn’t the final pass. I reckon there’s still at least two more editing passes before I can consider it final text.

In raw numbers… I can’t really say right now but the game doesn’t actually have that much text. This was the result of two things: me wanting to have some limits and constraints so I don’t commit suicide working on this, and also because the mood of the game calls for something that lets player piece together the mystery. What my inexperienced ass didn’t know, however, was that even games with “minimalist” dialogue are still fucking hard to write because I have to be so careful about what information is relayed to players, how and when. It’s fucked up. But I admit it’s still less work than writing a whole moffugging VN or some shit. Or maybe not. I’ve written long-ish games and scripts before and I didn’t suffer as much so I don’t really know what I’m talking about. It is what it is.

We’ve been focusing a lot too on certain aspects of development that were taking precious time from us, like the way localization works with certain dynamic elements and the way the game handles things like transitions, camera shakes and UIs. A lot of the game’s instability was caused by not actually knowing Unity that well so we’ve been adjusting some scripts to make use of more built-in solutions that can stabilize the game during all sorts of scenarios. It’s another one of those things that we learn with time, though we’ve also learned to not trust Unity on certain things. It’s a matter of knowing where you can leverage its millions and millions of lines of code with certainty. For example, I trust Unity events and Cinemachine, but I try my best to not depend too much on fucking Timeline since it’s broken beyond repair which is a shame because I LOVE that tool. Makes me feel like Hideo Kojima going cinematic n’ shit.

This August will be a bit complicated. My mood has been amazing after a bit of a terrible event, and I plan to keep that up but I have to plan for a travel later this month and I don’t know if that’s gonna throw a wrench in what we have going on but it shouldn’t. It’s gonna be interesting to see whether or not we’ll keep fixing long-standing issues in the next 30 days or if I’ll start blocking out more chapters so they’re playable.

That should be it for now. Not much in the way of extras in this post either. Not that much changed visually aside from assets that got polished but you wouldn’t know since you haven’t seen the previous iterations. The game is so weirdly put together anyway you’ll probably be able to datamine the old models from the final game, lol, and make the comparisons yourself.

Here’s a screenie anyway.

And a drawing I made of the game’s main character, Reila.

I really love how this one turned out despite being a relatively quick thing. Maybe I’ll turn it into the game’s box art down the line.

Which reminds me I have to start some concept art for new enemies and other things, but that’s just another one of my gorillion tasks in this project. Inshallah, I’ll never have to stretch myself this thin ever again on another commercial game. I’m having mad fun but I ain’t getting any younger if you catch my drift.

Kiri out.

Our priority at the moment is to stabilize everything that the game will use from this point forwards. You see, due to numerous changes in direction, we ended up with a bunch of dirty scripts and files that the game doesn’t use anymore. The game is literally running shit on the background that serves no purpose so that’s another thing we’ve been slowly chipping away at. It’s been comfy precisely because it allows me to focus on the visual aspects while the programmer does all the needed maintenance before we move on. There’s only one major thing we need to solve to avoid future headaches; mostly on the scene loading side, but shouldn’t take too long with proper planning.

I think this still counts as stepping on the proverbial gas, cause it’s mostly tasks that we sort of avoided while we took care of more important things. And now that we know what we’re gonna do for realsies the list has been getting smaller and smaller, as they depended on us choosing a direction for the project.

Spotty month, not gonna lie. This time of the year is fucked for me, but still managed to do a lot.

Omake

Not a lot that I can show this month! It’s all spoilers and I might have lost some of the videoclips I made too. Maybe next time.

Fun story: I worked like a week and a half on a very intricate introduction cutscene that was very good on its own, but once we implemented it… it seemed to be so out of place, lol. Like a trailer instead of a proper sequence inside a game meant to introduce players into the world. It’s good; not gonna say it sucked, but it didn’t fit the mood I wanted.

At least the above cut survived!

May was rough for me, mentally speaking. Not because I was feeling particularly miserable, but rather that I’m still not used to seeing writing as actual progress cause all I do is put words in excel while the game itself remains full of placeholder levels and stuff. The good news is that I finished the game’s script. For real.

It’s still the first draft, and it’s the 4th rewrite this game has gone through. We’re pretty happy with the direction after a fun table read, with some adjustments to do and things to watch out for that I’ve been chipping away in between other tasks. One thing I really liked got scrapped, but that’s the nature of the beast.

After exiting the excel dungeon I started helping with playtesting, feedback, concept art, etc.

Finished the models for the base weapons, some of the boss rewards, all accessories, upgrades. Was a ton of work but thankfully we already had those written down months ago for this very moment.

Now that June is around the corner, it is time to step on the proverbial gas and do a sprint towards a content complete build. With the script done I feel confident with how the rest of the game is gonna play out.

I’m never making a game as I go again. Holy shit.

Omake:

Concept to prop, part 2.

Moreover, work progress has been steady and without much in the way of issues to cry about (aside from old issues still arising this far into dev).

I’ve been slowly writing the game (currently finishing the 4th chapter out of 7) and gameplay-wise the second chapter is nearly done with the exception of visuals and the boss fight that we’re still debugging.

I had a nasty personal thing happening a couple weeks ago and didn’t work at all during the holy week/easter (I usually work those dates), but we’ve been back on track-ish ever since. I was worried about a lack of direction and focus when it came to the story, but I was able to write a lot of dialogue without a lot of drama after distilling what I really wanted and tweaking some aspects that didn’t feel natural. Very few issues as well other than figuring out the goal of each interaction and making sure there’s no redundant info being given to the players.

I’m still insecure about a lot of it but that’s just how creative work is. I’ll never know if this is any good until you guys play it, though in my head it’s all pretty cool.

Current goal is to actually finish the game’s script for real this time. There’s been some moments where I felt the whole game was already written, or that I was much further than I thought I was. But now that I’m doing all of this with the finalized structure I can safely say I’ll wrap this up very soon. It’s gonna be my priority despite not feeling like real work (something I struggle with a lot with when I do story stuff only).

Hmm, maybe monthly updates are a nice middle-ground instead of being vague every day about shit. I don’t wanna stop writing these logs but they add up!