This update is coming rather late. I’ve been recently trying to not count DevBlog’s as weekly posts, since it feels a little bit like cheating my way out of the work of finding a topic and writing an essay. This is probably just another case of me overthinking things and making everything harder for myself: While I think these DevBlogs are probably not the most interesting reads for a lot of folks, I’m sure this content is of interest to many who pursue game development, and may become far more interesting in the future, in particular once the game is released (fingers crossed), people have played it (fingers crossed on my other hand), and are interested in how it came to be made (toes crossed, how am I typing, this is starting to hurt). The most immediate side-effect of trying to decouple this from the weekly posts is that I immediately fell behind a week, and have been trying ever since to catch back up – funny how that works. The other side-effect, which I’m only realizing now, is that it’s become a lot easier, now that there’s no clear deadline for these posts, to keep letting them slide until we reach this point, where the DevBlog for a month is coming out near the midpoint of the month after. I’ll probably go back to just counting these as weekly posts just for the sake of simplicity and time management.
Around this time last month I was working on a way to draw reflections into the game world, and was stymied by the quirks of Unity’s Tilemap system. It turned out that many of the troubles I encountered were genuine bugs in Unity’s implementation, and once I was able to establish that to Unity staff they were able to give me a workaround that worked. To anyone struggling with getting color changes to tiles in a Tilemap to stick, you may want to look at the tile asset itself in the inspector and manually un-set the “lock color” flag – as I have discovered the hard way, when this flag is set through code, the value often gets erroneously reverted. With that figured out, obviously tile reflections immediately worked perfectly! Haha, just kidding, I had to spend a couple of days rewriting the shader to handle reflection scaling better, and the effect still only really works at a scale of 1 or -1, which means I can’t do some of the effects I’d imagined with emulating angled reflections. This is probably fine for now, and I have a decent idea what the problem is – most likely an issue with how a pixel’s distance from the reflection pivot changes when being scaled. In the short term it’s not a big deal – if the reflections in the background sometimes look a bit fractured, it only gives a sense of a bunch of slightly misaligned reflective panels, which is pretty much how a lot of modern building windows look anyway.
Though most of the environment of this planned section was built out last update, it keeps turning out that there’s more to do. Little side areas need to be created, background detail needs to be added, zones need to be tested for consistency and navigability, and lighting needs to be added and tweaked to ensure that important elements are visible and communicated. On testing I realized that many background elements are confusing, seeming to offer platforms to walk on when they’re just aesthetic details – I had thought that there was a hard divide between background elements (unshaded) and foreground elements (shaded), one being the space the player interacts with directly and the other mostly just for decoration, but it quickly turned out on testing that this wasn’t how my eye was interpreting the space. In practice, even if the different lighting style makes clear which elements are expected to be interactive and which aren’t, I’m still looking to the clearly non-interactive elements for clues to the interactive ones. For instance, if I see pillars and supports, I expect a platform, even if I’m too far away to actually see it yet – and as the designer I’m responsible for shaping and managing these expectations. With this in mind, I’ll have to be more careful to ensure consistency in this language, which will probably be a work in progress as the game develops. In the short term, at least, only minor changes are needed – primarily in removing flat lines along tile boundaries, since those give a visual impression of platforms that can be walked on.
A significant amount of time, though, was consumed by a truly bizarre tangent, and one emblematic of the reasons why I have a hard time completing projects. For the city tileset, I decided one good thing to include would be some neon signs that could be climbed on: I made a few of these and will likely make some more when I get to later sections of the city. One of them was a sign that said “Fortune” and had an eye on it. I placed this while I was building out the city areas and didn’t think much more about it at the moment – but a few days later, looking at it, I realized that this meant that the building underneath it now had to be a fortune teller’s room, and therefore it had to have a fortune teller in it.
So now I have this concept for a fortune teller NPC. I figured this would play a similar role to the fortune teller in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, who provided cryptic hints on where to go next, but perhaps a bit spookier version based on the tone of the game. This was a fun idea, so I spent a while playing around with writing cryptic-sounding dialogue about the plot as I understand it so far. However, as I wrote, these lines started becoming poetic and rhythmic, until it seemed maybe I wasn’t just writing dialogue but lyrics. Okay, then, maybe the fortune teller has some sort of song that they sing? Probably not every time, but maybe as some sort of easter egg – and as I developed this idea and character, it occurred to me: what if not just the fortune teller, but every major character has a song? A week later I had five sets of lyrics and five accompanying melodies, but still had now idea how or if this idea would fit into the game, or honestly even any real idea of how to go about producing a song with lyrics. I also knew there were a few more characters who I didn’t have a strong enough sense of to write lyrics for yet, and that I was going to need to go back and forth between these lyrics/melodies and the in-game music to make them to work together, and then I got stressed out and decided it would be a good idea to work on other stuff for a while, so I did. The lyrics, well – I’ll be getting back to them, probably. I just need to understand a little bit better what the rest of the game is, and whether these fit into that somehow or could perhaps become some sort of supplementary material like a secondary album.
Another weird side-path that I spent significantly less time on was that of art – that is, art which is regarded in the game world as art, like pictures in frames. I had tiles which acted as frames for paintings, and a few of these had images included with them – but I didn’t really like this approach because it felt kind of bad having a bunch of single-use tiles, because you can only have the same painting show up a few times before it starts feeling weird. At the same time, I was thinking a lot about what different kinds of art should exist here: If a space is strongly identified with a character, what does the art there say about that character? I was also thinking about the sensation of moving through dark areas and only seeing the paintings once you got close enough to light them, which seemed interesting. Thus, I ended up redoing the art so it was on a lit foreground layer while the frames were on another background layer, so the contents popped out and could be surprising. Most of the art ended up being super low-res recreations of famous pieces – I thought it was more interesting this way than just having each piece be whatever image I managed to dredge up from my brain.
Finally, I started getting NPCs working. I hadn’t originally planned on there being much talking in this world, but I think it’s much more interesting having an apocalypse if there are people around to react to it in different ways. I only have a few of these in so far, and there’s a lot of missing assets, but already they make the world feel so much more alive. I imagine that the density of these encounters will go down as the game progresses and areas become more hostile, but I’ll probably be doing my best to have a few people in every area, being their weird and stressed-out selves and being a lens through which the player can view the world.
I imagine the next week or two is going to be mostly adding NPCs and enemies to the areas I’ve made and doing frequent playtests to make sure the whole thing is navigable. Eventually, I’ll need to make the first boss – which is a bit intimidating as a task. I’ve never made a boss before, and I suspect my standards for boss fights, particularly boss fights for characters I think are really fun and interesting, may be exacting. In the meanwhile, there’s so much other stuff to get done – music and writing, character abilities and controls, additional enemies – that I imagine I’ll be able to adjust this big challenge in bits and pieces, figuring out the details as I go. Hoping to have significant progress on that front to show next month – or I guess in a few weeks, since this update is coming out so late in the month.