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[tsameti]

Working on a game. Tactics / Turn-Strategy. Single-player, linear narrative.

Elevator Pitch - Disgaea-like turn planning. No random number generators, just strategy. Heavy focus on 'zone' or position control to win. Illustrated, animated characters. Story influenced by Gnosticism (unfalsifiable), Quantum Mysticism (debunked), and world mythology.

I intend (at least I plan) to make parts of my toolsets publicly available. I at least hope to get my Map editor, and my Fountain.io dialogue parser out in the wild.

[tsameti]

Working on Dialogue stuff.

If I was a sensible person I'd just have dropped 60 bucks on something from the asset store and called it a day. But I'd really like to get better at extending the Unity Editor.

So you can see, it's nothing special now. You write and edit dialogue scripts with the editor, save/load delete etc. One nice thing is that I'm using Fountain.io as the format for my dialogue script syntax, so you should be able to pipe in a properly formatted TV/Movie screenplay, and it will parse as a valid script for your game.

Then I do pretty typical dialogue stuff. It'll be nice to reuse my Spine animated characters from battle in dialogue stuff. Give them some motion. I'm sure I'll hit resource problems down the line but it seems fine so far.

[PsycheMac]

This looks interesting. It reminds me of the waterloo level in Psychonauts. As a critique Id say that the current map is very busy and contrasted. This makes it hard to focus on any given part. Although I noticed you said youll tie the look together with some post processing so itll be cool to see what it looks like after that.

[tsameti]

I took a distracted moment and made an animated surface shader. It's a basic flip-book style animation from an image, with a second offset to give some break-up.




And here's the shader itself if ya wannit.
https://github.com/drzaal/spookyRiverShader

Some required improvements: I doesn't follow the rotation of the camera yet, which would be nice. It also doesn't entirely create the illusion of depth I wanted it to.
EDIT: It follows the camera now. Still a problem with depth-sort.

Let me know if you have questions!

[tsameti]

I'm trying to get the playable demo out by end of year...
meantime I need to start putting together promotional materials / character teasers.

The nature of a parasite is that it consumes, it does not produce. It's burden, it's waste. You live in a time of unprecedented privilege, build on the labor of a thousand generations that labored and suffered before you. Prove to me that you deserve it.	The truth is, every misfortune you've suffered has been your own fault. In malice, in negligence, you've done your damnest to hurt the people you love. Isn't it virtue to punish the guilty? Wouldn't you say self destruction is the only real justice?
You've put your faith in the future. Evasion, desertion, cowardice. This is your time, your generation, your prime. Whatever failings, whatever sins your society is guilty of, they are your own inadequacies. When your children pass judgement on you, will you really have done better? Been better?	The worst part is... they don't love the real you. They love someone else: the performance. Your facade. They will despise the real you, if you show them. How hard is it to live a lie until the day you die? Is it wrong you know it's worth it?
It wasn't Destiny, it was a roll of the Dice. When two people love each other very, very much... can they make a calamity together?

[tsameti]

I'd been lazy and put off setting up a way for my levels to 'unlock' when progressing through the game.

Here's a draft of the hub/worldmap zone. Greyed out stars are 'locked' until prior levels are cleared. Might be nice if I show some visual indicator of levels which are finished, or connected... will do that later. I also need to get some glow outlines on the TextMeshes, I know.

[tsameti]

I am not so great at animations, trying to get a bit better.

Working my way slowly through a redone attack animation for the first antagonist.


It's passable but I think it's missing something that would really wow you. Maybe a better wind up? Some deformed inbetween frames?

[tsameti]

I'm refactoring and extending my Map editor.

I dislike my old solution which rendered mapData in the inspector, which was okay... but left me with limited screen real estate to allow for more editing features.

I'm Extracting my map editor into a plugin, moving the editing into the Scene View, and starting to add and sync more to the serialized map save. Slow going because I keep thinking about what features I might need this to fulfill down the line, instead of what I need it to do right now.

What I really need to be focused on is ONLY getting mapObjectives into the individual level editors, adding a win/lose dialogue hook, zone occupancy win condition, and a few additional unit prefab override attributes.

I've also got a few character illustrations I'm in the process of flat color and slicing up for animation prep. They'll be rush jobs, I will have to probably come back for another quality pass down the line.


Finally, trying to learn what my options are for projector shaders. Objective is to swap out my individual circular cursors with a bordered zone cursor. Should reduce screen clutter... I'm hopin'

[tsameti]

Moved a bunch of the map editor into the scene view.

Might break this out into a module and chuck it into the Asset store, but I'd have to clean it up a lot first. The video is a bit jacked up, but... I don't want to fix it while there's other stuff to do.

[tsameti]

I've hit my personal cut off point for working on the game.

I'm going to step back for a minute and focus on work stuff.

In the meantime, you can play the alpha here
https://z0lly.itch.io/poikolos

Please let me know if the PC build doesn't work. I have a feeling the shaders... may not.

Here's are some characters in various states of progress

[tsameti]

Feedback is that the game is not in a presentable state, and it would be worth tackling a few items on the usability list. Trying to prioritize.

I am eventually going to be extending the map objectives behavior to allow configurable win conditions per map.
Which means I need to add some clarity, not only for what the objectives are on the current map, but what objectives were cleared in victory.

(this will allow me to add optional objectives)

To start, I just took a moment to flash the player current objectives on battlestart&restart. Some players felt it wasn't clear that losing a single unit is a lose condition.

[tsameti]

Pause menu. Starting to play with animating and designing my menus a little more actively.

Want to do something more interesting with the turn end button, make it harder to click accidentally. (hold for a quarter second to confirm)

[tsameti]

One of the gimmicks of the game was meant to be that the characters transform to gain abilities, and that this would tie into character development, the larger story, and tactical decisions during play.

To that end, spent some time working on on of the characters, Sunhee and her red transformation 'Mantis' (there are some red ones, I swear). Sunhee's personal struggles have always been about feelings of insignificance and discomfort in her own skin, so her transforms are various insects to reflect those insecurities.

Sunhee has undergone some redesign, so Mantis will need some changes to make it clearer this was the same person. Right now she just looks white, which is confusing. So, still work to be done, but I do like that hop.