All the way to the back of the backend

BLOG ENTRY 26 - 4.8.2021

DEV STATUS

Well I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks due to the fact that all the stuff I’ve been working on is not the flashy kind of work? There’s very little that I can “show” that would be of any actual meaning towards promoting the game, still and Update is in order.

PLACEHOLDERS & EARLY DESIGNS

I got this neat little program called Kenshape from Kenny.nl, it’s a really useful tool for making quick prototype assets. I was able to mess around and make an early model of every type of ammo, and currency.

Placeholder Currency Assets - Made with Kenshape

Everything else is accounted for. Ammo from all Factions, Creds, Varos and Scrap. I don’t have a “special” type of currency planned yet, but It may end up being necessary for building special weapons or items. I’m only unhappy with the “Varo” (Indie Currency) but I think I can make something else for it soon.

NARRATIVE WORK

The reason I hadn’t posted anything is because I have been busy studying and working on Narrative introductions for all the playable classes. I have an Idea about using the template used by Warcraft and Apex Legends. Hand painted low frame rate animations that provide enough emotional impact but don’t require 60 frames of animation per second.

It hasn’t been easy considering I myself am not a writer. I like to study writing and art, but I’m not exactly proficient in either of those artforms. So I’ve been learning how to write a screenplay, wrote several first drafts for each of the playable classes as well as the captain. They are very rough and can be polished quite a bit, but I’m very proud of them as now I don’t have to keep them in my head all the time, they’re out and about.

The next step in that is doing storyboarding, I think I can handle that since it doesn’t have to be extra detailed, but it’s still hard to do when you’re a complete novice. Maybe next week I’ll have something to show.

CONCEPT ART

We’ve made quite a bit of progress as we’ve finally established a concept art format that will be perfect for our studio. Once we a couple of them filled we will begin to post some images, for now all I can say is that I think that template can work for other people as well and I’ll be sharing it as soon as I make sure it works as we intend it to.

We’ve also been studying character construction in order to start making the action poses we will use for each skill. I have plenty of animations from Unreal’s Marketplace, I’ve also been studying the Control Rig plugin. It is fucking amazing. With a little bit of practice I should be able to adjust the animations I have to fit something more to what we need. I’m hoping that we can manage to make custom animations for every class and enemy. This way we can communicate the type of threat and how aggressive enemies will actually be. It’ll take some tweaking for sure., but ultimately I think it’s worth the work.

PROTOTYPE STATUS

I was able to troubleshoot a problem that was causing the HUD to not be constructed. The problem was in my character select logic. That I had the HUD being constructed just before I removed all widgets from the screen, which was meant for the Main Menu and Character Select screen. Now the HUD shows up as intended. Still no logic behind it so it doesn’t actually reflect the shield or health. But it looks really neat :D

Another thing I fixed was the Character sheet widget. Before every time you pressed the tab it would make a new one. leading to it always remaining on screen. I’ve added a toggle that I hope is the right way to do it. but for now It works as intended. Still deciding whether or not to keep it to the right or change everything to the left Diablo style. I think that will come down to an Aesthetic choice.

I haven’t added anything else particularly new since the last update, mostly optimizing and cleaning up assets. I have so many assets I’ve gotten from the unreal marketplace that my project is unwieldly. I currently have ONE prototype level where I’m testing everything and the project weighs 55 GB. This is mainly to the high quality of textures sounds and materials that I have from the free assets themselves.

I have to go through all of them in order to see what I’m actually going to keep and what I’m definitely not using. There are a lot of things in the “maybe pile” but I have to make sure that I’m keeping things that might actually be of use later on. This has been a particularly tedious process as every time I choose something to delete. Unreal takes a bunch of time checking the assets and then triple checking you want to delete. I appreciate the protection redundancies in order to make sure you don’t accidently delete something that was important. but it takes so much time.

NEXT STEPS

What I’ll be working on the next couple of weeks is making sure I can get the project to a size that I can upload to github. From there it will be to polish and make sure all the characters skills, animations and hud work well.

I will also be working the storyboards for the Narrative introductions for all the characters, as well as one final screenplay I have missing for the Technician character. After that I will take a break to ensure I’m focused on the right things and begin unreal courses to fix, upgrade and/or polish the essential features of this game.

For now I’m going to take the rest of the day off and continue tomorrow. Therapists orders.

Being as productive as my brain chemistry allows.

Daniel “Freaky” Aguilar

Game Designer

Plasmapunk Studios