MilkyNail

Hello, everyone! Sadly, there’s still no demo today. But these last two weeks were extremely productive! Next time, I plan to give you at least something, my good people. We need cutscenes, dialogue, some polishing, and lewd art. Sounds manageable! For now, let’s start reading!

Starting light with a bunch of small changes! I added a disclaimer and music to the main menu and two locations. Reworked the nature sounds a bit. The NPC and the teleportation stones now display small “interaction” icons when the player is near. NPC can now walk around and stop (and turn) when he has something to say (WIP) or when the player is near. I fixed respawning and added teleportation (both in and out). The main character now performs a dash with a running animation and slight incline.

The artist created neat assets and three layers of background for the second location, the Village, and drew pictures of the first NPC and the enemy. The animator finished polishing the main character’s animations and started working on the two new characters mentioned earlier. After a lot of work on state machines and the spine code animations work like a charm. They are much smoother now, at least..

I reworked the main character’s melee attack. Now, it deals damage once per sword swing, consists of two-combo attacks, and able to deal damage while actual animation plays. The character even steps forward a little when swinging the sword! So cute:3

I added a ranged attack with a pretty “cut” effect on hit. Press the right mouse button to freeze and slow time while preparing a “magic drop”. It’s super fast and precise, and it comes with a handy aim line! It can even headshot enemies! Yes, I added critical hit zones to the enemies. But beware: taking damage will interrupt the aim!

The new enemy is a deer mage that can cast slow magic orbs. An orb forms at the end of it’s staff and starts moving toward a player, literally following you, and slowly decreases in size. It explodes on contact or after expiring. If it hits you, you take damage based on the orb’s current size. You can also hit it with a melee attack!

As I said, I’ll try to give you something playable in two weeks. The work is progressing, but the amount of it is crazy! [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! I must confess that the first week of the month was a disaster. I was completely overwhelmed by a very mid task: creating a “finite state machine” for the main character that would manage it’s animations. My mind simply was failing to process this task over and over again.

But after a week, I finally set up the “machine,” and now all of the main character’s animations are running smoothly! Hooray! I had to learn how to use another plugin for this.

I never mentioned this before, but I almost fucked up the whole project due to careless manual backups some time ago. I got very lucky that time, but I knew I had to do something about it. Now, I’m sleeping tight knowing that I have reliable daily backups with version management. Second hooray!

I also spent a couple of days fixing the particles that the main character would emit while running and jumping, as well as the camera. Both had some.. jitter. Now they don’t jitter.

I’m currently in the middle of setting up the second and final location, Village. The sky with clouds is set up, the ground is ready, and the nature assets are almost finished. The artist is working on the background and an NPC for that location. I’m adding a behavior tree so the NPC can walk and talk.

Sorry again for this one-week disaster. I’m back and working. [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! Last time, I bragged about the idle pose of the main character. Now, I’m ready to show you the very first location! 

The artist created a complex background with six (!) layers for the forest fight location, including the ground and nature assets like bushes and trees. Oh, there are also ground inclusions like bones and stones! I added all of these elements to the game, set a nice parallax effect, make grass shake when the player passes by. And the clouds and moving, too. Damn, I had great time putting everything together~

The animator is working on the last animation of main character these days, and while he does that, I’m trying to make the main character use Spine instead of the placeholder animations I created months ago. It’s not a fast process…

Oh, and I added a dash! The main character can use it now, it’s pretty cool.

How about some quality-of-life changes? Now, when the game loses focus, it pauses automatically! The “breathing” effect has also been improved, the camera moves up and down smoothly now.

I also created a document with ideas for future NPCs and quests. I won’t use it anytime soon, but it’s nice to be able to write down good ideas as they come to me. Work is progressing! I’m absolutely sure that I won’t be able to show a demo in two weeks, but a month sounds pretty solid. P.S.: I hope you had a good Halloween~ [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! The last two weeks were quite rough. The real work starts now! As it starts, we’re experiencing some minor problems with.. everything. After all, we are a team of three now. And we’re learning to work together.

First of all, I found a pretty good Spine animator. He and I think alike, he has a lot of experience, and the prices are good. After a week, I already have five or six animations of the main character (we need twice as many). I should also mention that I started learning a few things about Spine, but it’s really difficult for me for some reason.

Before we began, however, I had to create a proper design document and write down all the tasks for the animator and artist for a month. It took me four or five days to complete it, but after that, the future game started to take shape! I think the first demo will be ready in a month or a month and a half.

What about my good old artist friend? She’s been working nonstop the last week because there are a lot of tasks ready for her. She drew the main character from different angles for the animations and started working on locations.

Slowly but surely, we are getting there. As I said before, some time was wasted on fixing work processes. But I have to say something. The previous attempt at making Homelands (the previous 2D game) finished at this very step. Nothing worked, and the development was jammed for good. This time, everything is working like a charm and I’m super happy about this!  [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! I’m happy to report that we’ve started to work on the game’s art side! I also learned the very basics of shaders.

After publishing the previous post, the first thing I did was write a little design document for the game’s visuals. Then I contacted good fellow (and very talented) artist girl and asked her to help with the game design. She agreed and sent me some good artwork shortly after. I’ve attached one of her pics. It’s just a concept, but I already love it! The next task is to create the main character, which is currently in progress.

Not so long ago, I also started looking for animators to bring the game to life. I’m still rummaging through resumes and collecting candidates. It’s looking really good, I already found a few skilled people. I hope we’ll find a new team member (the third one) in just a few days. I’m going to keep the team small, without sound designers and concept artists. Not like I did a year ago. Let’s try this new approach.

Before I started looking for animators, I had some “free time” while waiting for our artist to decide on the future style. I added a version number and a changelog to the main menu. Then I moved the buttons around in the pause menu and added a quit button. Now, a “press again to exit” window pops up in both the pause and main menus.

What’s next? Shaders! I wanted to learn the basics of this gamedev magic. And I learned a thing or two. After several days of severe headaches and studying spatial and temporal trigonometry, I can perform basic tricks. For example, I can make the main character flash white when it takes damage! Or add a vignette to the borders of the screen. I also tried playing around with the enemy’s projectile, but it already looked pretty cool, so I just fixed a few bugs without changing it’s appearance.

I can’t wait to create a demo with art and animations, but for that, I must find a really good animator… [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! The last two weeks were pretty boring, so I’ll keep this short.

I took the quick week off, as I mentioned earlier. Bread baking and town strolling helped to clear my mind. It was really good and necessary because the next task is extremely daunting for me. It is adding art to the game.

To make things simpler, I decided to try creating AI art. I wanted to use it as a sketch for actual artists! Long story short, it didn’t work very well. After studying for a few days, I can create pretty good art and manage Stable Diffusion’s medium-difficulty features. However, it takes a lot of time, and the results are pretty abstract. It’s good for giving you sudden ideas, but overall, it was a waste of time. Sadly.

Tomorrow, I should take a deep breath, prepare a lot of money, and start looking for artists. This step was a disaster when I worked on my previous 2D project, so I need to plan carefully and learn as many lessons from the past as possible. There are no shortcuts.

Thank you for reading this! I guess I should be going now. See you in two weeks! [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! We did it! The very-very beginning of the game is ready. [An NPC meets the player at his Home and gives him a quest to kill a monster. The player goes to a location, completes the quest, then goes to Village to talk to the NPC again.] The coding is mostly done, yes. The next step is to hire artists to replace the placeholders with cool graphics.

Now, let’s talk about the new quest system! Do you remember my last post where I described how I had to create a navigation system from scratch? Sadly, the same thing needed to be done with quests… I found a plugin called QuestSystem. I spent four days looking through its code, scarce documentation, and the demo project they provided. That demo project was full of modifications and proved to be almost useless. I hated it. Yet, I managed to modify the plugin and make it work. Hoorah!

Then, I added more UI elements. Added a small text field in the corner of the screen that shows active quests, a big pop-up notification that indicates the start or end of a quest, and a small text field on the right that notifies you about inventory changes, something like “+1 apple (1)”.

To try out the quest system, I created Village and placed an NPC there. To move the player between locations, I reworked teleportation stones a bit. The fight location now has a manager script that gives a random enemy a key that needs to be retrieved to leave the place.

Then, I was sick for four whole days, and honestly, I’d like to take a week off now after three months of work. I just wanted to notify you all. I’ve reached a huge milestone with your help, and now I need some time to recharge mana. Thank you for your support and belief in me! Can’t wait to start working on graphics. [No more abandoned projects]

Hello, everyone! The last two weeks were almost entirely devoted to enemy intelligence. It was a massive task. And I’m gonna tell you EVERYTHING.

I woke up at the first day and started gathering information about moving characters on predetermined paths. Within a day or two, I fully accepted the sad fact that there is no Godot plugin for this task in a 2D platformer. All built-in path features were very limited as well.

Needless to say, it took a lot of time and effort to build my own system to move an enemy robot around. I rebuilt its movement two or three times, tripled the size of its behavior tree, and built my first “tool” to help manage waypoints. Yes, I had to create my own waypoints. (I have to add that this system will work with future NPCs like a charm)

In a week and a half, the enemy robot was walking and jumping around using the most efficient ways. To my huge joy. So, let me tell you about the system I made:

• Enemy patrols any territory you tell him to guard.
• He will shoot the player if he sees or “feels” him. (You need to touch or stand close for the “feel” part)
• The enemy will chase the player. He will also rush toward the player if he is hit by an arrow from far away.
• And if he sees a flying arrow, he will rush to the place where it landed to investigate.
• If the player is nowhere to be seen for a long time (“must be the wind” case), the enemy will resume patrolling as if nothing ever happened.
• It’s nothing serious, but he stops shooting when the player “dies.” A rare detail in modern games. For some mysterious reason.

I don’t think such complex behavior is necessary in a porn game. However, I wanted to spend a couple of weeks making the enemies look “real” and somewhat smart. After all, players will be fucking them, right? [No more abandoned projects]