#devjournal

[mikesfangames]

WHAT progress report!

Well gamers, we're reaching the final destination! WHAT now has two of three endings drafted. I'm truly thrilled to see it all coming along, and honestly, a little shocked! It wasn't that long ago that I randomly had a stroke of motivation, and decided to learn the basics of RPGmaker! It feels like it's all happened so fast, which honestly, it has! I think I've been working on WHAT for a few weeks now, usually in intense chunks of work that spanned several hours. I think my longest streak of game development was, uh, maybe 12 hours straight?? So that's nice! As for what's left to be done aside from a whole secret ending, I probably won't be able to stop myself from going back and doing some minor graphical or musical adjustments. I've already gone through the entire game and touched up the dialog once, but honestly, I'll probably do it again. Just small adjustments, of course. I'm also going to get some cutscenes from the INCREDIBLE @orange-circuits, which will take some time. Playtesters may have to settle for my crude storyboard sketches, haha, but what's important is that the game is 95% done now! YAY! I'll probably have some promotional art out soon too, if that matters? As for what's next, I have another game with some familiar faces that's got a ton of assets and is fully scripted. Unlike WHAT, it will have a largely original soundtrack brought to you by @blue-miaou, and more amazing artwork by Gaius! That game is The Facility, and I am SO excited to get started on it. It's also tangentially related to SinDec, but will be more accessible to people who have only played OFF! Once again, thanks to the creators of SinDec for giving me permission to make fangames of my favorite fangame!

Anyways, I just needed to get hype about the approaching release of WHAT! I worked on endgame stuff for about 6 hours today, so needless to say, I am very tired. Will probably resume development sometime tonight, to hasten playtesting trials. See y'all soon!

(BBEG does it's best impression of Dagoth Ur)

[sootedkobold]

Just some initial assets for building the base game :3

[quietdaysco]

The Process: Research

Ever wanted to make something, but didn’t know where to start? We too. In this second installment of The Process, we’ve finished forming our idea and now it’s time to inform it. 

2. Research 

Mind you, this isn’t a “step two” per se. Here’s the big kicker on what we soon discovered about this part of development:

Research is an active, ongoing process, whose goals change throughout pre- to post-production.

We may have created the idea of Primrose Path but our research didn’t stop at the end of pre-production, as if to say we’ve got everything we need and now it’s time to dive into making it. During production, we still had questions. Research is the only reason that, if you stopped us on the side of the street, the topics of future biomaterials and methods, dynamic UI design, and historic architectural eras could all pop up in the same conversation.  

And all of that is valuable information to us, because researching is relevant in every area of the process! But what kind of information did we look for? 

Our five categories are Community Canvassing, Story & Character Development, Team Management, Game Design, and Marketing. 

Let’s break it down:

A. Community Canvassing

Identifying and learning our target audience.

Identify personal wants from our game.

We have to stop and think: what kind of game do we want to play? If you want something, chances are, there’s a group of people out there who want the same thing. They are our audience.

Identify the type of media and genres relevant to our game.

Our video game is a visual novel, and its market genres are predominantly adult, drama, and romance. Because the medium of visual novels originated and is popular in Japan, we use the term otome (Japanese for “maiden” or “girl”) or otoge (portmanteau of “otome” and “game”) in our genre list. So, our game is an adult, drama, romance, otome—or focused on a female main character who deals with a cast of potential male partners.

Case any census data and statistics on target and related communities’ research blogs.

This one was important to us because we like considering quantifiable data that gives us the bigger picture. Statistics blogs and databases helped us get a clearer view of different demographic subsets of the visual novel community. It’s also important that we read material about sister media like the general interactive fiction community, as both deal with reader input and resultant story-branching.

Inquire fans in those genres for game recommendations and any opinions.

Community hubs are a click away. We connected with others via forums like Reddit and instant messenger servers like Discord that specifically revolve around fans and game developers of the visual novel medium.

Read game reviews in those genres by other fans and critics.

The most interesting thing for us when we read these reviews is not so much what someone did or didn’t like, but what aspects of the game they focused on, and what other topics they decided to connect to their original answer. You may be surprised how people decide to expand on their answer and where tangents lead, which is very telling, valuable associations.

Connect with other developers for support and networking.

The Western visual novel community is a small community, but commercial success is not confined to said community. Building a rapport with other hardworking devs is important, as it follows us in such a small space—for better or worse. There’s a lot to learn from the wider indie development community, too.

B. Story & Character Development

Creating an organic experience.

Real-world parallels to inspire for or reference in game direction.

Whether we take a trip to the city with a camera and sketchbook, rent and buy books from libraries and bookstores, or visit Google Maps in satellite view, we are pulling up everything we need to inform our game’s locations, people, and events.

Observe and converse with people.

The behaviors, quirks, appearances, opinions, and feelings of people are abundant, and it’s not until we observe and sometimes familiarize ourselves with others that we catch some of the concerted expressions that create a nuanced individual. 

Interacting with others is first-hand experience, and listening to or reading others’ experiences is second-hand. If we can't write from first or second-hand experience, we must inform ourselves with other sources, as it’s crucial in writing characters with whom we may not directly or easily identify. We often defer to interviews and documentaries to start.

Psychology and sociology research.

Sometimes reading from experts about general trends and triggers of the human condition makes it easier for us to understand, verify, and better portray things like addictions, behavioral disorders and mental illnesses, fetishes, and cultural stigmas for our character development and world-building. Though this isn’t limited to negative or abnormal things we cannot identify. It can also be in what ways the values of a person or society evolve, or how players interact with video game avatars!

Read and deconstruct critically-acclaimed novels in our genres

It’s understood that if people want to become better writers, they have to become better readers. Being able to settle down with some traditionally-published, well-received books relevant to our interests will help us build on our knowledge of suitable writing conventions, as well as analyzing broader narrative elements, like plot pacing. We even have a list of writing resources saved to help us break it all down!

C. Team Management

Standardizing ways to increase workflow efficiency.

Pipeline development.

Know a general end-date to keep in mind for the finished product. Setting a scope for our project and a timeline for production challenges us to keep on task as we work towards that date. We’ve set ours up by month and refer to that document for phase estimation.

Time management, task delegation, task tracking, and work logs.

Whether your team is me, myself, and I, or made of employees and contractors, it’s important to stay synchronized and keep record of that progress. Quiet Days has our own GitScrum board to help us with assigning tasks, timing how long a task takes us versus the amount of time we expected it to take, and streamlining the process from start to finish. It also keeps track of percentage of overall project completion and key performance indicators (KIP), or the metrics of a user’s personal contribution and work ethic over a period of time. There are a plethora of other task management sites and apps available to use too.

Style guides to standardize writing and art.

Between the two of us at Quiet Days, we both work on the 2D art and writing, and we both default to different visual and writing styles. So, we’ve set up and continue to add to our respective guides, keeping the art style and narration and character portrayals consistent. This is especially helpful should we take up other artists or writers, so that they can easily assimilate into our workflow. 

Account delegation for social media and company correspondence.

Understanding who does what for cohesion under a company brand is important for its image. We share all accounts under the company name, so technically both of us have access, which works well for our team of two. It’s early, but so far “delegation” seems to have taken on a natural division between Coda and Elm—the former taking to micro-blogging, and the latter to streaming and forum correspondence. While this dynamic may change in the future, we both refer back to each other under the Quiet Days brand.

Potential for contracting help.

We’ve considered that there may be a time in production where a helping hand is needed. Additional considerations like the freelancing market and pricing are kept in mind for the future. 

D. Game design 

Scrutinizing game elements from a developer’s lens.

Consider for which platform to design.

PC? Mobile? Console? Cross-platform? While we are primarily designing our game to be played on PC, should we want to capitalize on popular handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch, for example, things like game engines and builds, game optimization, resolution, encryption, touch capabilities, and content guidelines for their private company platform all need to be considered. These things change between platforms.

Consider designing globally.

There are people different from us who would like to enjoy our game too. We consider the user experience (UX) for things like the possibility of game translations and using fonts types that read well for different language characters like Chinese or Russian. We also consider how to customize the experience to accommodate for players with different cognitive abilities, which falls under accessibility features.

Play what’s commercially un/successful and community-recommended.

We can learn a lot from both good and bad game design, and what the community mostly consumes. We engage with these games and take notes on graphics, accessibility features, user interface (UI) designs, game mechanics, soundtracks, and overall presentation and aesthetic. What did we like and what would we have preferred?

Stay updated on game design development tips from industry heads

There are people who have been doing it much longer than we have, and a number of them are setting industry standards. We can learn a thing or two in how they handle a problem and find solutions.

E. Marketing 

Methods for optimizing outreach and return of investment.

Social media strategies for engaging and involving our audience.

We’ve laid the groundwork for character accounts on social media to launch as a way for our audience to interact with characters from our game. While role-playing is a fun marketing and meta world-building device, we’re exploring other cool avenues like exploitable images and audience challenges to drum up future participation. 

Types of advertising and promotional materials.

There may come a time when word-of-mouth may not be enough. Would we consider purchasing ad space on different sites for greater visibility, or spend money on “promoting” features on social media? Would we commission or create and sell promotional merchandising for our audience?

Crowdfunding platforms and prospects.

Popular ones like Patreon, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo all have their draws and their drawbacks for creators and supporters alike. For what expenses would we crowdfund? What additional rewards would we provide for the financial support, if any? Do we want financial support for our project, or continual financial support as a company creating content? Some developers don’t actually use these platforms to request funding, but as another way of advertising their game. Would we do that?

Cross-exposure with other devs.

Interviews, public events, and collaborations with other game developers is a win-win situation with everyone involved. We want to be able to not just network, but allow each other to introduce our products and skills to a greater audience, creating and sharing a unique, dedicated fanbase in the overlap.

The Takeaway

At the time of this post, we’re still in the production phase, so some of this information isn’t applicable right now, but no knowledge is wasted: these things will always be handy to know and consider for later. We’re making our decisions in lieu of—and even despite some of—our research, in order to create a game that we’ll love and hope others will too. It’s important that as a game developer, you too keep yourself informed!

Speaking of ongoing research, Western otome is a largely indie market with many small, tenacious teams and hardly any corporate studios. If you are a Western otome developer, please contact us! We’d love to interview you in a Q&A, get your input on your process, and feature your story on our blog! 

[codeofelm]

Day 3 - Unity - Game Objects & Unity Editor continued

A brief one today, sort of. Well, not really but I’m not talking about anything in depth. So let’s just go through the overview. 

Editing Game Objects

Game objects are pretty much all the assets within your game scene, so it’s pretty standard that we would want to affect them in some way. The hotkeys for these are pretty much standard across 3D engines and 3D software. Let’s take a look.

W for Move

E for Rotate

R for Scale

To hide and un-hide game objects, the shortcut is H. Whereas isolation view is Shift + H.

When it comes to transforming, we have RectTransform and Regular transform. Rect-Transform is intended for 2D and GUI elements to be placed inside, and only works in two Axis of a rectangular shape. It has all the manipulation of moving, scaling and rotating in a single gizmo. 

Sometimes you might want to deactivate a game object to temporarily remove it from the scene. You can do this by unchecking it in the inspector window or with script by using activeSelf. 

When you deactivate a parent object, you also deactivate all of it’s child objects. If you want to deactivate just the child, you could use a code like this: 

void DeactivateChildren(GameObject g, bool a)     {         g.activeSelf = a;

        foreach (Transform child in g.transform)     {             DeactivateChildren(child.gameObject, a);     } }

This will affect the activeSelf settings of the child object, but not the parent.  If you make changes during play mode, they don’t save.

This is just the beginning of affecting elements inside your game. To continue to do so, you’ll want to understand other aspects of the windows within Unity. 

 Apologies for the quick summary, but I’m hoping to speed through this. 

Pivot toggle lets you adjust from the object’s pivot, or center of rendered bounds.

The Scene View 

The Scene View let’s you choose options for viewing the scene, but also control whether lighting and audio are enabled. 

To the right of the Render Mode menu are three buttons that switch certain Scene view options on or off:

2D: switches between 2D and 3D view for the Scene. In 2D mode the camera is oriented looking towards positive z, with the x axis pointing right and the y axis pointing up.

Lighting: turns Scene view lighting (lights, object shading, etc) on or off.

Audio: turns Scene view audio effects on or off

The next icon is to toggle off skybox/fog effect, and the eye is to toggle scene visibility and counts the number of hidden objects. 

Under the camera menu, a lot of the options seem rather self explanatory, but one option I wanted to take note of was occlusion culling. 

Occlusion Culling You’ll want to this box to enable occlusion culling in the Scene view. This prevents Unity from rendering GameObjects that the Camera cannot see because they are hidden behind other GameObjects.

Camera Speed

The current speed of the Camera in the Scene view. The minimum speed of the Camera in the Scene view has valid values between 0.01 and 98.The maximum values are valid between 0.02 and 99.Gizmos

The Game view The game view is what the game will actually look like. At least one camera will control what the player sees.

Aspect Select different values to test how your game will look on monitors with different aspect ratios. By default, this is set to Free Aspect. 

When you enter ‘play mode’ to simulate your game, you switch to the game mode by default. But remember, any changes you make to your game during play mode are not saved once you exit. This allows you to experiment without damaging the game. 

Low Resolution Aspect Ratios

Check this box if you want to emulate the pixel density of older displays: This reduces the resolution of the Game view when an aspect ratio is selected. It is always enabled when the Game view is on a non-Retina display.

Stats

Click this to toggle the Statistics overlay, which contains Rendering Statistics about your game’s audio and graphics. This is very useful for monitoring the performance of your game while in Play Mode. 

Stats are looking pretty good considering it’s an empty scene! 

The Inspector Window One thing about the inspector window is that it shows the components of your selected GameObject. With component scripts, the order you need to use when queuing components in your user scripts is the order that should be seen in the inspector.

Scenes Scenes! Scenes are environments and menus of the game. They work like levels. A must for building games in pieces. In terms of their position in the editor, I don’t have much to say about them yet. 

Thus, we’ve reached the end of this post! We won’t be going over custom editor tools. This post was a little boring, but hey, sometimes things are.

[lenoremakesgames]

Not so much a devlog as a devjournal when I write about my devemotions...

[14domino]

docker run -it -p 8181:8000 -v /home/ubuntu/word_db:/db:ro --env-file webolith/config/config.env domino14/webolith:latest

(and 8180 instead of 8181)

on home machine

ab -kc 100 -n 1000

For haproxy stuff

apt-get install ruby gem install haproxyctl

Need a haproxy.cfg file that exposes the socket. Need latest HAProxy:

https://haproxy.debian.net/#?distribution=Ubuntu&release=trusty&version=1.6

Take down a server cleanly

sudo haproxyctl set server servers/server2 state drain

Need to set up health checks, and figure out when a server is done draining

[dingolearns]

Day 2

Made a weak little idle animation where her hair flows in what seems pretty nonsensical. Also got an armless walk animation. it was a lot easier than i expecting actually. Will add arms and shading next time i get to sit down. just need a jump animation after that and i can get back to unity. maybe an attack animation.

Stay Sharp~

[fromsmiling]

So CHOPSQUARES has a website now!

The game has sort of blown me away in the past week and a bit, after releasing it. With a good number of really cool things that I was not expecting at all. After first putting it out onto the internet, it got some really good reception from everyone that played it! As well as a bit more attention that I even thought it would get, I really have to thank all of my friends for their support it makes me super happy and I couldn't have done anything without them.

So one of the first things that happened is my friend Elissa wrote a dirty CHOPSQUARES fanfic, and then Jessica made some NSFW fan art inspired by it which made me fall over laughing. A bunch of awesome people got to play the game unexpectedly too! Shortly after I got an article on Indie Statik which was really something!  As well as the first Let's Play! It's super weird having other people review your work, because they see different things in it, which is really cool?

I really want to special thanks Damian Sommer for helping me out with so much stuff because I am an incapable baby. He really helped me push the game out there, helped me organize the tournament that we ran last night, and is the super coolest dude! CHOPSQUARES is also going to be at the Bit Bazaar Winter Market in Toronto on December 7th, there's going to be some cool merch there! So, if you're around then, totally drop by!

[mikesfangames]

Hello everyone! Guess WHAT??

My game is in the final stages just before playtesting trials!!! Yippee!! For REAL this time!

Sooooo much work has gone into finishing WHAT that I could have never anticipated, as a stranger to game development. Over the course of the last few days I've been hard at work on making lots of little graphical improvements, including redoing ALL of the facesets, adding more expressions, touching up sprites and including more animation in the overworld. The art part of game design, at least in my limited experience, takes SO much longer than adding dialog or events in game! Like, wow! I have so much more appreciation for the little stuff that goes in to making a game look and feel more alive!

Don't worry, though, I have been touching up the actual game and code itself. I've added an intro cutscene (generously provided by Gaius), a Bad Ending Cutscene, and am now working on the code for the Decent and Secret ending. My biggest hurtles have largely been surpassed though, because I finally got the credits cutscene set up!! I'll definitely have to touch them up later, but having something to conclude each ending with definitely makes it easier to plan out the pacing of each ending.

I'm not sure exactly when the game will release, but I hope it'll be sometime soon! Like, hopefully within the next week or so! Then, it's right back to the grind with another SpinOFF!!

Anywho, here are some examples of the graphical adjustments I made! Feel free to critique!

Lugosi's old facesets vs his new ones (I literally had no idea that the pencil tool existed... gradients are so much easier now.)

Old battlers vs the new ones!! (I added a whole extra guy!!)

Every boss gets their own custom battle screen!!

Also, uh, BEHOLD: GRIFFITH

I just felt the need to show him off... so excited for you guys to meet him.

[mikesfangames]

Sorry everyone! What's taking longer than I thought. I'm a very ill individual who's often sick, and a new medicine I tried put me out of commission for a while. I'm definitely still working on it, but in addition to What, I'm working on another project!

Say hello to Spire!! Ehehehe...

[mikesfangames]

Progress Time!

Basically: Oh yeah, it's all coming together.

I've played through the vast majority (abt 90%) of WHAT, and can say with confidence that it is VERY close to being finished. All I have left to do is the final boss and its related cutscenes and WHAT is complete! Currently I'm still working on the area right in front of the Big Bad (which is also 90% done) and tweaking just a few minor dialogue choices. Afterwards I'll probably honestly end up touching up all of my facesets, since they were all made before I had any idea about what made sprites look good in game. Custom battle screens will also probably be made, at some point, but all of those minor fixes really are nothing in the grand scheme of things. WHAT is just very OC centric and already made very niche by virtue of being a Sincere Deceit fangame, so I'm just trying to make it as visually pleasant and interesting as currently possible. I even completely redid the old battler sprites!

I'd say I've really, really enjoyed my time working on WHAT! I don't know if my next game will come together faster or slower than this one, because it will very likely be bigger and more plot heavy than WHAT (which already recieved some fluffing because its impossible for me to resist world building). WHAT has already taught me so, so much in the short span it took me to make it, and I'm glad that I chose to make a small game like WHAT first instead of just leaping headfirst into a big project.

Anyways, this progress report is quickly becoming about my future SpinOFF, so here are some screeshots to tease what's coming in game!

(Keep in mind, some of these things CAN and WILL look different by the time you get to it!)

[quietdaysco]

The Process: Dev Insight

Ever wanted to make something, but didn’t know where to start? We too. Since this is our first game ever and we’re still fresh in development, we decided to chronicle our process in creating our visual novel, Primrose Path. We think insight into how the two of us attack the complex problem of making something exist is a great thing for us to look back on when we reach our goal, and for other aspiring game devs to relate and learn from.

Let’s start from the beginning:

1. The Idea

How did we come up for the idea of our game? Well, it all started with Elm’s idea: a game where you can romance men who are based off of the cardinal sins. Yes, that’s how it all started, and yes it’s very played, but why would we pick up from there?

Our Motivations

How it started for Elm:

What motivated me was the current visual novel market. Visual novels have always had a special place in my heart, but man was I getting tired of what was on my plate. It didn’t feel like the medium was maturing with it’s audience. There was no shortage of amnesiac clueless protagonists, where all you had to do was marry the love interest and get the good ending. (That’s not to say there haven’t been some truly great games in the medium, but they often go unnoticed.) At the end of the day, I wanted to see playful interactions, deep character relationships, rich story-lines and strong atmospheric narrative in more visual novels.

Thus, Primrose was born, partially out of deep-rooted frustration but also partly out of excitement for the idea. I wanted to create stories that allowed others to feel the way they made me feel. I wanted to use my love of narrative in games to create atmospheric and meaningful choices, and Primrose was quickly becoming that opportunity. What started as a joke had quickly become my favourite project to work on.

Personally, I love growth and project management. When I entered University for 2D animation, I wanted to improve my illustrative skills. I switched to 3D Games Art when I realised there was an entirely new skillset for me to learn. Afterwards, I dipped into sequential and comic art, and learnt so much from that. The end result led to me having an understanding of the unique combination that is cinematic composition and text, 3D pipelines, 2D animated workflows, and the use of interactive narrative to create endless and unique experiences. Ultimately, I knew I would end up making a visual novel at some point, I just didn’t know it would be now. 

As for Coda: 

This became an opportunity. It didn’t feel like it at the time. It was all brought up in a kind of joking context, and so I jokingly took Elm’s “seven deadly sins” tripe and wrote up some mad predictable character types to match. I shared them back. And when it was received well, a back-and-forth ensued for more creative character building. It grew into an organic exchange and it kind of fueled an already small fire in me. Maybe this was a chance to create something and leave a mark, but I would have never anticipated it’d develop into the scale currently planned. It never crossed my mind what kind of outreach was possible, just that I wanted to collaborate something fun for a change.

But what motivated me to even continue past the point of brainstorming? When did I decide that I’m willing to hunker down and take this into production? It was a culmination of things. I’ve attended college as an undergraduate working towards a Fine Art degree with an interest in illustration, but I never had an opportunity to be employed within my field of study or anything administrative. I wanted to break out of my retail history, but I had a recent streak of being passed up by lot of potential employers for someone with more experience or a college degree—any college degree, at times. With all these perceived dead ends, I felt the need to create something myself in my own field of study, to proudly be able to show others as the peak of all my talents. I had to take control over what I could control.

Our Interests

Both of us have an interest in art and talent in illustration, with Elm specializing in creating 3D designs, and Coda with 2D animation. We both enjoy the art of storycraft, combining Elm’s penchant for outlining and analyzing story arcs and plot pacing, and Coda’s interest in crafting prose and character creation and dynamics. And we both love to prove ourselves to ourselves. We can get pretty competitive if you challenge us!

In the end, it was clear we were driven by our passions, improving our portfolios, and garnering a publicity that’d lead to eventual profit.

Our Relationship

It’s important to understand too the unlikely fortune of how easily two strangers—who, at the time, barely knew any of the other’s artwork!—are able to work together. We had an existing relationship in an online chat for artists, both being active and talkative community members and easily riffing with each other, so it was clear we were both casual and approachable people in the first place. We didn’t seek each other out to contract; this just naturally developed between two ambitious, complimentary personalities. In private over more involved matters, we both know how to speak respectfully to each other, talk through disagreements, and compromise. But we absolutely want to stress to anyone hoping to collaborate with other people:

Clear, consistent, and upfront communication with your partners is extremely important! 

The moment you know you want to create a marketable product and need to work with someone else to get you to your goal, you absolutely have to communicate that. For us, we established very early a mutual recognition of what we personally want out of the project. While we both wanted the same things, it’s important to know what the project represents to each of us so we can measure out and balance each other’s investment. 

If you’re in a binding partnership like we are, there should be an intrinsic investment in every partner involved. If you’re working with contractors, while money may be a factor if either of you charge, they also willingly create quality work if they believe in you and the product. Check with and update them actively, make sure they understand their roles and project duties in your pipeline, give specific and constructive feedback, and socialize to build a comfortable and trustworthy relationship. And if you feel like someone’s not pulling their weight, you need to be direct about that too, in private and tactfully, because in the end, you need to look out for your goals and maintain those positive, worthwhile relationships.

So, Elm and Coda started with a silly idea about the cardinal sins. Now it’s become a story that explores the line between “good” and “bad” people. Once we refined, the rest was history.

[codeofelm]

Day 0 - Unity - Let’s make a project

The first thing to dive into, is to look at how Unity handles creating projects. This part is extremely simple, but does require you to know what sort of project you’re creating. Today, I’ll look at the approach I would take for creating my two 2D projects; Primrose and Companion. 

Primrose

When it comes to Primrose, one of the visual features we were certain about, is the need for parallax backgrounds. This is a term used for 2D (or 3D scenes with a locked camera), where the background is split into layers to give the appearance of depth. Often seen in platformers or racing games. 

The layers are intended to mimic a foreground, mid ground and background affect. This is pretty important to us, as some gameplay is actually tied into this effect. 

The way to achieve this is rather simple, but leads to interesting effects! When creating the project we’ll use the 2D project template setting. However, when we open the project. We need to make sure our camera’s project is changed to Perspective instead of Orthographic, and ensure that our scene view is set to 3D. This will allow us to achieve that parallax effect in-game. Why do we have to do this? The 2D camera/orthographic camera only displays information in two axis. This is usually perfectly fine for 2D projects. However, switching to perspective will allow us to use a 3D camera and acquire the depth we need with parallaxing images. 

Inside, our project may look something like this. (Image from Unity’s documentation). 

Cool, right?

Companion

On the other hand, Companion setting up a game like companion is relatively straight forward. The project is just a full 2D template as it won’t require the use of 3D elements. So we’re okay to use the default settings for this! 

Later, I’ll talk about how these project settings differ and what other options there are. 

So now we have our project names and template. What else could there be? The engine, of course. 

Unity Version

Unity has a long line of versions available, each update hoping to be a better version of it’s previous iteration. 

During our development, we will use the latest version of Unity available at the time. This is not necessarily the wisest decision, however Unity overall is a rather stable looking engine! The other option is to use a LTS version or Long Term Support release version, which is a version of unity that is considered stable and have support for an extended period of time. The current LTS is 2018.4.7f1. This is a good idea for games which may have long development times that may last more than two years. 

My personal recommendation would be to not update your Unity version mid development, especially after starting the project development in earnest. A lot of things could break this way!

Another reason we don’t use an LTS version of Unity, is because we run our dialogue systems off Discourse - A dialogue tool available on the Unity Asset Store. (We’re excited to be early adopters and help demonstrate how much easier it makes some parts of development). 

Currently this process is being written with Unity 2019.3 in mind. As I write this, it’s in beta - however, it’s likely to be out rather soon. Tomorrow, we’ll look at asset formats and inside Unity’s interface. 

[the-pygmalion]

The Pygmalion - A BL otome about Robots

Wow! I’ve finally made enough progress to open a tumblr and to start documenting my journey through making this game! 

The Pygmalion is a Boy Love otome/dating sim where you play the roll of Apega, a recently created self-aware AI as he navigates his existence and forms meaningful relationships with the characters he meets!

My current thoughts on my progress are under the cut!

5/7 character designs completed.

I’ve finished up most of the character designs and have a basic outline for everybody’s personalities. Only a few of the characters have names as of right now but the cast is so far:

Apega - the protagonist.

Nabis - The Dollmaker (your creator)

Ace Harper - The Mafioso your creator pays protection money too.

‘The Robot’ - A secretly self-aware dragon-like robot who wanders.

‘The AI’ - A siri/cortana like AI who runs the setting’s appstore for users.

‘The Cyborg’ - A full body combat cyborg who comes to the doll maker for repairs.

‘The Security Guard’ - He works as a security expert as a mega-corp

The general outline of the plot has been finalized. There will be three major acts followed by a conclusion. You’ll be able to romance all six characters with one of them having two different endings.

The goal is to have an actually interesting plot, with the bonus of some cute romances. The actual story itself will have at least two different endings. 

I would call the plot 10% complete at this point.

This coming week:

-Get the characters bios and personalities finalized.

-finish up the last of the character designs.

-Start planning out the routes for the main plot. 

-nose around in the legalese department.

Long Term:

-Concepts for the game UI

-Music?? Look into finding someone who takes music commissions.

-Decide how hacking mini-game will work. Plan for other minigames. 

-start character sprites.

This first post is a short one! But it’s a start. I’ll make sure I have art and images ready for the second one. And over the weeks I want to make bio pages for each character so look out for those!