This week I kind of tried to do it all.
Starting with more then doubling the word count of my script. Writing stories has always been one of my favorite things once I get going I get going… and I’m still only warming up.
Secondly I picked and upgraded the models for my main characters:
I figure this is a pretty good level of detail for the minigames (and it keeps animation on the simpler side as well). But it really isn’t good enough for the VN sprites, for one they aren’t quite expressive enough for VN. So I still need to upgrade them further.
And lastly I spent a LOT of time coding the VN stuff, mainly customizing Groggeroo’s Blueprint Dialogues System still. Most of my time went with changing the text to rich text, which proved to be way more trouble then I thought it would be. The reason I felt the need to change for that is because of how easy it is to set and change the fonts and stuff mid sentence and all that, which is quite important for VNs as the text is basically the main actor in them. I still feel kind of bad for defiling Groggeroo’s hard build code, and I hope he won’t be too mad at me for that:
I was planning on doing more this weekend, but I happened to get FFVII Remake early yesterday… which effectively ruined my plans of coding. You win some, you lose some, I guess.
Next week: more coding(/defiling perfectly good code) and writing and maybe some more character work as well.
Tho, I am quite sure FFVIIR is going to eat most of my time. But hey it’s also done in UE4, so maybe I’ll manage to pick up some tips and inspiration while playing.
Starting off with the script again, I’ve managed to break the 10 000 word checkpoint, which equals roughly an hour of game/read time. This gives me hope in the fact that I really CAN write a proper visual novel and not just a small demo of one. Although one worrying thing I have is that with the story getting longer and longer I also realize jut how many sprites I’m going to have make for it… but at least I don’t have to animate them so that’s a plus.
Next the graphics:
So I did a bit of iterating and upgraded my models yet again (though the skirts remain a bit dull still). I think that I need one more loop in order to make them “visual novel ready”. After that I should start preparing the backgrounds, and while I could make them (much like these characters as well). in one fell swoop in a designated size… personally I got a bit a… fetish if you will for this kind of gradual addition of detail, so I’ll most likely make my backgrounds iteration by iteration as well…
It’s also easier to do it that way when you have to make them pixel by pixel (at moments like this, I really wish I had a drawing tablet or something).
Lastly the programming side… I’ve quite well managed to butcher Groggeroo’s baby while following Project Ispheria’s visual novel tutorial and applying that to the system that I already had. And at the moment I’m pretty much done with all the text handling stuff (which isn’t quite interesting enough visually to warrant a picture), so now I can start applying the visuals of VISUAL novel system which should net some more interesting pictures for next week’s update (provided I get everything working properly).
I’m glad to say that once again, I’ve made some nice progress.
Starting again with how I’ve gotten a couple thousand more words to my script. I’ve divided my writing and events into days, much like many visual novels do, and I’m still writing the first day, meaning that I’m getting more and more hopeful about the whole story being of a decent length…
Then moving on to art:
I think these models have the right level of detail to work well as VN sprites, so… next I need to make about a hundred different poses and expressions to account for everything I need in a visual novel. I am still fine tuning them and… layer-…i-…fying them (= separating the different parts of the character into layers… after drawing them).
The game is finally starting to look like a visual novel. As for the code I’m trying my hardest to make it so that everything would be doable with datatables/sheets from outside the engine I’m also making all the commands as simple as possible to be more writable without difficult scripts and numbers to remember. It’s a bit of extra work but I’m sure it’ll pay in the end.
I also did some UI design, and am thinking about some more decorative versions of the UI, even though this current version already looks nicely aesthetic for a pixel art game, at least for me.
I’m also fighting with the idea to make different decorations for each character so the dialogue box would change depending on who is talking… but I’ll come to that later as I further in the UI design.
Next week, I’d like to get my first background art piece to get the real feeling of the game more visible (the black background is hardly pleasing to look at in a visual novel).
So, following last weeks example, I’l start with the script, I finished the first chapter, or the second iteration of it, now just shy of 15 000 words. Next I’ll go through it a third time as I move it on to a csv file. After which it should be quite game ready…
Then to graphics:
This week I worked on my first background, in five iterations. I did it by first making a quick reference scene in blender to give my some aid in perspectives (while I can imagine the environment, I’m not quite as adept in imagine proper perspective). After I followed the same process as I did with the characters, where I first did a really low pixel version (16x9) and then kept increasing the density and adding details iteration by iteration. And I think it turned out quite nicely.
Next week, though, I’ll plan to spent more time on giving the characters more expressions and poses, because at the moment they are still only those base models.
Lastly for programming… It’s actually easier to show this time through video then to explain so… https://youtu.be/7tKFn5iv-MY
So basically it’s just sprite control and background, not much more. But it is an important thing nonetheless, and Groggeroo’s is starting to be even more unrecognizable then it already was…
PS. also the video is my attempt at getting some use out of my youtube channel, as I feel I’m just wasting it not posting anything, and I figured the visual novel format lends itself quite well to this kind of logging.
So I’m still slowly moving the script from Word doc to spreadsheet, the main slowdown is the structuring, deciding on sprites and actually creating those sprites… but I’m starting to get on the roll as I keep making more and more sprites.
as for the coding side of things, I’m still following Ispheria’s tutorials, adjusting as I see fit. The main things this week were the save and load functionalities as well as the codex. Though, for my purposes I had the idea to change the codex into the shape of a diary which could have pages, text and images in it as well. I still need to do some testing for it, but the basic codex works as it should, the diary is just a step further… both code-wise and graphics/UI-wise.
Next week would be… more of the same as this week, Though, I think it might also be good to start making the reference scene for the next background… if not even a couple iterations on the actual picture.
(This update ended having a lot less pictures in it, due to the video format handling the visual side quite well, so my apologies for the wall of text.)
This week was more of a preparation week than a progress week…
This has nothing to do with playing LEGOs at all… I just… I realized, thinking forward, that there’ll be a lot of stuff that I need to do in terms of character poses. I mean it’s totally acceptable that the character looks directly at the screen, because visual novels usually, mine included, tells the story from a first-person perspective. In my case that’s through the eyes of Silvia. However, it’s quite unnatural that characters would keep looking at the main character when they are discussing with each other (if there are two or more character in the screen at once). So realizing this, and the need for possibly quite various poses throughout the game I started making a reference model to help me in the future:
It has taken me many days just trying to rig it properly… It still isn’t anywhere near good, but it’ll do for now, and I’ll keep improving it as I go.
I also started building my reference for the school:
Which I figured I’ll pretty much need to make most of the school for, because there are many places in a school that I might use as a backdrop. So it’s good get started on that as well (of course I’m won’t make photorealistic or anything, just general shapes and placement… enough to work as a reference).
Also here’s the new vlog: https://youtu.be/-Ry2AqBRRbo
…which is quite filled with pretty much nothing other than a few “jokes”.
Yes, FL Studio is pretty great, even with just the Trial version one can already do pretty much anything… other than load saved projects.
UPDATE #23:
This week was quite busy as it was the last week of school for me for the semester, but at least now I got unhindered time to work on this (or at least until TLOU2 comes out).
While I did not make that much progress this week, at least I got a new background done:
Other than that there’s pretty much only the video: https://youtu.be/J0ivdSvm0jI (which is starting to steer more and more away from actual updates)
I really don’t want to make any promises for next week, but I’m going to start working on the sprites for Rina (the green-haired girl), so I’d get further in the game ready story… other than that is only writing more story and some coding to advance the visual novel system.
So this week was quite, how would you put it… nostalgia driven(?). I kept rummaging through my old files and projects and playing through games from my childhood and what not.
Needless to say, I got very little actual work done.
Thou I did get a nice sprite for Rina. Now I just need to make some angle shots, so the characters on screen can look like they’re actually talking to each other instead of just looking at the main character…
I really got stung by the nostalgia bug last week, and continued on to this week with that, spent most of my time playing old games and working on the upgrading the old assets of my first UE project (which I originally used to learn the the engine and the basics of gamedev)
Thou I did manage to make the first set of angle shots for the characters:
I’m thinking that ideally I would like to have a full 360 degree spin of all the characters so I would be able to correctly project the first-person view of the the main character in the story… I kinda wish I was working with 3d models instead of pixel art models for this… but that wouldn’t be any fun now would it, and it would mean that I would also have make all the backgrounds in 3d as well (minigames I could still make in 2d, as they are supposed to be like “games of the mind”)… besides, learning the ins and outs of pixel art is quite fun.
Anyway, I’ll be working on more angles for Yuuna and Rina next week.
This weeks video: https://youtu.be/N6EbtjY74mY
The videos are certainly starting to take a more sketch-y approach each passing week…
So I’ve been doing decreasingly less work as the weeks have progressed thanks to a certain release date drawing closer and closer. This week I spent time checking and fixing some of my script and writing some new stuff, but not really much else. And I would assume the next two weeks won’t be much different, at least not in the positive direction.
But at least I was still able to make another episode (not really sure what these videos should be called):
This isn’t really an update for the game, rather something on the side that kind of has to do with the game…
So, background: a few weeks back I started doing research on my Master’s Thesis topic, which is about interactive novels, their history, trends, and design implementation. This week I started working on the project that goes along with it, actually implementing the past design trends, providing a more mechanical perspective into how the designs worked and how they can be implemented in modern interactive novels.
To start it off, I transposed my novel (or a small part of it) into a text-based adventure:
The whole process got me thinking that UE might not be all that well optimized for text adventure games, or at least that it might be easier to make one with just regular ol’ C++, without the engine in the background. Most annoying issues being that I can’t disable the mouse to make it keyboard only, and that in order to activate the text box, one has to press TAB every time (instead of just automatically activating upon creation).
And yes I know that for a text adventure game, UE might be a bit of an overkill, but since it isn’t the only part of the project, having the potential for more advanced stuff is good, and I doubt that in the end, it’ll have much “wasteful power.”
I know this is a pretty random addition to devlog, but it is still kind of tied to the game, and who knows what discoveries this Master’s Project might bring in to the actual game…
After almost a month of silence I think it’d be best to write something akin to an update again…
And as anyone could probably guess, I haven’t been doing too much for the game this past three or so weeks, as TLOU2 and preparing for the upcoming Ghost of Tsushima have been keeping me quite busy, with most of my other free time going for my Master’s Thesis research (going through dozens of visual novels, most of which are near impossible to find, isn’t easy work).
Good news, however, is that my prototype for the text adventure game is pretty much ready:
There’s not much visible difference for now, but on the inside there’s a lot more and it’s also s bit more generic allowing for further reuse for other needs. Also running with the good news is that I have indeed come up with a few ideas on how I could implement this text adventure feature in my actual game, but I still need to play with them a little more before I decide on which idea to actually go with.
But man, writing for a text adventure sure isn’t easy, especially transposing a pretty linear slice-of-life story for a text adventure has been quite difficult. For the foreseeable future I will continue to work on my Master’s project, which actually helps with the actual game and also it’s story (it’s a kind of a new perspective which a hadn’t thought about). After I’m done with the text adventure I need to come up with some visuals for the 1st gen visual novel implementation, which should provide some more interesting updates… possibly.
Yes, I use the rich text blocks in UMG to render it, that way I can guarantee that the text is on screen at all times, without having to worry about cameras. That also kind of makes it more complicated than just writing a text adventure without the engine, along with a few other problems I still haven’t been able to solve (the lack of automatic focus on text input for one), but at least I can develop it further quite easily from there…
Speaking of which,
I finished the prototype of the text adventure that I need for my Master’s project… and moved on to designing the feature I’d actually use in the game:
A combination of these two, a “diary adventure” if you will. I felt it would be fun to have either a optional thing at the end of each in-game day or a bonus mode that unlocks after progressing far enough in the story. A diary version of the story, with an unreliable narrator with and certain things changed from how the events actually happen (this’d be very apparent for the player after going through the actual events beforehand). Possibly also adding some more introspection and detail to certain events with the whole diary and adventure premises.
The hard part was, as expected, cutting the text between two pages when there are too many lines to fit in one page. I have the pages set up as different components and I figured I could just move a child from one component to the other in its current state, however the moving the child means reconstructing the child as well so I had to do some patching to get it working well. Not that there isn’t some patching and fixing to do still, but at least it works mostly properly now.
with spread changes and turning pages to work as a log. There were a bunch of problems along the way, some of which were expected and some of which were quite surprising, but it works, quite well might I add. The parser also has the neat feature that turns the commands from present tense to past (if needed), so the player doesn’t need to concern themselves with proper time forms even if diaries are usually written in the past tense.
Just need add saving and loading functions and I can move on to the next part of my Master’s Thesis/Project.
So I finally finished the diary-adventure thing, with save and load functions and everything, and boy was there a lot of bugs waiting for a fix as well (of course there are still stuff like graphics improvements, etc. to be done, but they are not really all that important atm). I tried designing the UI to sit as naturally in the background as possible, but the small pixel count of it made me ditch some possible solutions for others.
For example, the page turn button in the lower corners of the pages, which I originally wanted to look like turning the bottom corner as if getting ready to turn a page. Which was too hard for me to get looking with only so many pixels to work with in the background, so I settled for using those double arrows which pop up once hovered over.
I used the same pop up method for the Save and Load buttons which I camouflaged as those sticky tabs and they are color coded. Just like the deep red Exit button on the side, I figured coloring it and placing it the same way as the X buttons in… pretty much every graphic program ever, would help distinguish it.
Thou, they are mostly meant to be used with a mouse (making this not a hundred percent text-based) they can still be focused on with the tab button… but hey, modern times, modern solutions.
Now if I could finish writing the diary version of the story, I’d be all set…
But next it’s time for phase two of my Master’s project: illustrated text adventure, aka the first iteration of a visual novel.
While the base of it is really easy to do using the prototype text-adventure that I have, I’m still kind of struggling with the modernized design that I want to implement (like the diary for the text-adventure phase).
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) in music production. It sounds good. I’m curious to see the progress
