Very cool, congratulations!

I envy you for getting things done! :')

Ah! Well, I'm looking forward to seeing how things proceed

What I usually see in cases like this when conditional forms aren't supported is just representing both forms simultaneously, like sjelden(t) or sjelden/t.

Not sure if .po files have some neat solution tho, like they do for plurals, or it might be possible to hack something together with custom keywords but it seems tricky.

(the solution for my custom system is just a bunch of tags, so the entry for sverd would be tagged with its grammatical gender and then the entry for "rare" would be a list of forms with corresponding tags and the system can pick the correct one )

Love reading about this stuff, definitely not boring!

Teaser was nice too But yes, definitely some gameplay one way or another would be great to see if you make a trailer too.

Cool to see even more recognisable faces/voices/franchises cropping up. I knew Simon from Doctor Who but Savannah was new to me (I've heard of House of the Dragon but not watched) so I looked at IMDb and that's when it hit me that I guess all these people will have listings for Moonbriar voice work on there eventually? A fun thought.

Also good luck with the demo! Really neat to see the game on the Steam Deck.

Wooohhh, congratulations on the funding!!! That game does look a lot like BJA at first glance haha

Also love me some localisation. I've worked with Poedit in the past and actually used it again last week at work (all manual tho, never looked into the DeepL stuff).

Unfortunately solution 3 on your list doesn't work in every language. I'm guessing it works in German because adjectives are uninflected in predicative use (das Schwert ist selten, die Rüstung ist selten)? I'm not sure it even works in French (but with rare specifically both forms are the same) but correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not at all sure. In e.g. Norwegian however sverd (sjelden) does look just as wrong* as (et) sjelden sverd (needs to be sjeldent in both cases, -t corresponding to German -es).

*(sjelden in particular is actually weird in that it can in fact drop the -t depending on the speaker but most adjectives can't)

Hello again! I've thought and wondered about you from time to time ever since Tidepool didn't work out. Nice to see you back Sorry to hear that you're already feeling some of that burnout tho. Hope you manage to find some balance.

This sounds interesting. How does it differ from something like Tabletop Simulator? Is it meant to actually enforce the game systems, unlike TS? Curious about the huge tech stack too, what are you using all the different things for? Unreal for the game client, React/TS/JS for the website, Java for the server stuff? o:

Best of luck with this!

Very impressive! Not my kind of game to play but the devlog is a lot of fun to read/watch. You were good at this stuff already when I saw your posts a couple of years ago but you seem to have improved even more Are the enemies not using their shields to block yet?

Nice to see all the full game elements coming along besides the core platforming and RC tech

61

Evaluation & screenwriting

February is over, so a quick final look at the task board…



Both of the last two columns can be considered as "finished". The sole task "in progress" is the open-ended "schedule NPC timelines for the café" and the rest (besides some greyboxing) are bug fixes or desired tooling that can safely be migrated to the next board; I just needed to jot them down somewhere in the meantime.

So I think this worked out well. The scheduling task is finished in the sense that I did as much as I could within the time limit, but I didn't get far before I realised that I can't wing it completely.

This leads us to the next task, which won't need a board...

Detailed script

All the writing I've done so far is very high-level. I know where characters are when, and roughly what they need to say and do, but until now I haven't scripted any conversation or interaction in detail. This is what I want to do now, since it's much faster to iterate on paper than in the actual game

Screenplay

Since the game is basically like a big 360 movie when you explore the past, my conclusion was to simply write scenes just like a film script. Since I'm focussing on the café now, it's all just one long interior scene.



Since I have all that language stuff I decided to try and write the dialogue as they would actually speak it in order to keep things within their own cultural and linguistic framework. Helps me get some work done on that as well. But I'm okay with doing it in a clumsy or incomplete way so that it doesn't hamper progress, adding notes to insert missing words or names later if I can't immediately think of them.

Software

I've played with Celtx in the past but apparently that became paid and more limited (including web only) since then and I just wanted a desktop application to save local files. In the end I found WriterSolo, which is what you see in the above screenshot. Working well so far!

Plan

I'm only a few days in but it's been fun so far! Cool to finally figure these things out and come up with details I haven't previously been at a low enough level to fully consider. I've also found minor timeline mismatches and patched them up. Trying to weave some of the background that I outlined in the character update into the conversations but I still want to make sure that almost everything they say is actually relevant to something. Going back and forth to fine-tune~

So I'll be working on this until further notice.

Thanks, everyone!

Nice to see how organized you keep things (at least compared to the parody of a process I'm working with).

I try my best

I recently bumped into an interesting looking watercolor post-processing effect: https://github.com/keijiro/KinoAqua (inspired by https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ltyGRV). Subtle use of something similar might fit in here.

Oh, these are lovely. Always nice to have more references too. I'm going to have to clean up the code of mine a lot at some point.

Great update! Looks amazing already. Love how textured everything is and how it really feels like it's made of, well, paper and clay, and other materials. Fun way to do PBR while remaining stylised. And so much work on levels and so on! Looks very smooth to play.

Missed a few updates. Congrats on the award!! Read the thoughts regarding the tower mechanic; might not be for everyone I guess but hope you can balance it. Do you personally enjoy playing with all these things in place? Upgrading video to an in-game cinematic sounds beneficial in many ways.

Congrats! Trailer looks good. Any chance of a Mac build?

Hey, it's Jarl from the Merlin TV series! He's certainly got quite the voice. Well done! That'll surely help the trailer grab attention, despite your other worries. Hope you can put something cool together

Sorry about the publisher tho, but I'm glad they were constructive and that you don't feel reliant on one anyway.

Very interested in seeing what ends up happening with the problems surrounding the shop mechanic… Sounds very difficult

Devlog anniversary

Another unnumbered update as I finished some more stuff and it happens to be the day, but no big fanfare this time



That's the current progress. I've more or less finished the last prep I needed to get started on the schedules now… Got branches working as well as milestones so that I can group some events as relative to some named starting time (i.e. "when the big ship arrives") and then I can just move that around and have the events move with it.

Today I roughed out some of the characters I need for the café. Need a few more and then I'll start trying to schedule 'em! They're not all supposed to have the same eyes and so on so they look more alike now than they will later, but you can differentiate between them already and maybe you recognise some from earlier sketches

Looks good, I like the presentation going from clip to clip with the projector sounds Is it, like it seems on Steam, Windows only? Would it be easy to build for Mac too? Or can't you put that on Steam without the whole notarisation shenanigans?

Watched the VOD on Twitch, very cool Feel good about your presentation?

So like animating "on twos"?

Yeah! 12 FPS is precisely the idea too. Seen it in some games and I think it looks nice. Seems to feel good as long as camera movement and inputs are still snappy.

I would add just as idea: low-frame rate animation with some blur or post-process can make interesting visual style (given that it fits overal style you intend for the game). It can amplify this hand-drawn look and it can stress that low-frame is intentional.

Yeah, that's definitely something to play with when I get back to graphics

It is great you built the foundation for your localisation system already! It looks easy to use and effective.

Thanks! Yeah, I like spreadsheets for this since you can compare translations side by side and you can have extra special columns for things like notes about the context too.


Three more tasks down for the price of one. One at "completed". Two at "testing"; these I also added subtasks to, and checked them off one by one.



Also been trying this thing where on every finished task I write a comment that explains what solution(s) I went with since I'm going for the "good enough for now" approach.



This time it was all about animations

Creating placeholder animations

First task was to add temporary animations for a few basic states and to connect them up into a new animation controller (state machine with blending) in place of the old one since this is a new model with a new rig which will be set up somewhat differently.

As you can see below they are really rough and even buggy (weight painting needs some work) but I just need the states for now



Working with the animation controller

The UI stuff comes from the second task. Just some quick and dirty editor things so that I can test and visualise the animation states. I'm not going to have a lot of animation controllers I think but the character one is going to be quite involved so this will hopefully save me some time.

To hammer home just how basic it is, the boxes collectively represent what looks like this in Godot and similarly in Unity:



Besides being able to set the variables driving the state in the editor, I'm skipping any sort of interface for creating these controllers in the editor altogether. The JSON files are easy enough to edit by hand and hotload does seem to be working fine so I don't have to restart the editor to see the changes

Figuring out the workflow

The third task is just that while making the animations I found and fixed a bug with hotloading those, so things should be smooth going forward I hope (the plan is to add new animations as needed on the fly when working on NPC schedules).

Throughout all of this of course I've also gained some more insight into the Blender side of things. For my old character model (made ages ago now) I believe there was some weirdness with the glTF exporter at the time that forced me to do all sorts to make animations work. I had to reset the rig's pose before exporting, and I had to line all the different animations up on an "NLA strip" like this:



Don't have to do any of that anymore it seems, so that also speeds things up. Just add an animation action, animate, leave the character in whatever pose, export, and hotload the new clip into the editor and keep going

Planning ahead

I've also decided to try and have some fun with the blending and separate things like the motion of the arms when walking so that I can easily and procedurally play with the variables for each character to give them a distinct gait but saving that for a later stage

But I'll also use this to make animations modular so that I can really tailor things to the schedules (e.g. turning the head while running or reaching with an arm while sitting, by blending separate states for head, legs/body, individual arms, etc.). So hopefully setting all that up should be easy enough with the visualisations I added to the editor.

I think I've also said before that I eventually want to play the animations at a low framerate for that hand-drawn look.