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[JosephSeraph]

Heirukichi's Progress:    

• Fixed a bug causing the turn character to act twice in certain situations
• Fixed a bug causing sped up characters to have their action consumed instead of the turn actor in certain situations
• Prepared wrapper module to handle battle actions

Jo's Progress  

• Researched design articles and brainstormed ideas for dungeon mechanics.

Another brief post this week, next week we'll start our new blog which we'll link here! Besides Heirukichi's steady progress on ironing out bugs, we've discussed the ideas we've gathered for dungeons last meeting and it was very interesting. Mechanically, there's a lot that, thanks to Heirukichi, we can pull off. I'm excited about it!

We're also currently talking to a composer for the game, and I'm also very excited about it. Soon, the first town and the dungeon especially, will begin to come to life!

[JosephSeraph]

Hey! I'm a bit late this week, but there we go!

Heirukichi's Progress

• Fixed a bug causing the fastest character to lose one turn at the beginning of each battle

• Fixed a bug causing unexpected game crashes

• Created skill handler for playable characters

• Created basic structure for enemy AI

• Integrated GUI into the battle system

Jo's Progress

• Created the base tiles for the first dungeon.

So this week our bullet list is small, but the progress is substantial. Hefty progress within the code, as well as the dungeon is shaping up, and on another note we're almost ready for new collaborator (who's on the music) to start work on the dungeon theme! I'm very excited. I still want some further progress within the first dungeon, though, so he can really get a feel of it.

So, to finish this off, here's the base textures I worked on this week. To the left is the base, "depth map" versions of the textures, to the right is the polished versions with several layers of painting and adjustments on top.

Looking forward to see what the next updates will allow us to bring!

Have a nice week everyone. [/list][/list]

[Heirukichi]

There we go with another weekly update on our current progress.

Heirukichi's Progress

• Improved HUD class to make skill selection easier to handle.
• Improved animation on skill selection by making empty boxes impossible to select.
• Created animation to highlight characters when it is their turn.
• Fixed a bug causing the camera to be placed in the wrong position.
• Fixed a bug causing enemies to be displayed with a wrong Y coordinate on the screen during battle.
• Improved HUD animations to make the transition between exploration and battle smoother.

Jo's Progress

• Added the moss tiles to the dungeon.
• Made the tileset seamless.
• Created mockups for the enemy info and turn prediction windows.

This week we are very excited because we are nearing a stage where we can have an internal prototype for testing purposes. The battle system is far from being completed, it still needs a lot of polishing on animations and game-play mechanics, however, it has finally reached a point where we can actually see it working, even if with many placeholders.



As you can see from this screenshot, it is obvious that we are still using many placeholders: our enemies are still not colored, we are still working on ways to make the selected weapon easier to read, but the battle system is there and can be used to actually fight.

It is very easy to understand (or at least I hope it is) which character is the one who is ready to act. However, we would gladly read your feedback on this. Do you think it is easy enough to read? Do you think we could mark it in a better way? Every kind of feedback is very appreciated.

In the background, you can clearly see the texture that Jo made, even if this one is at a lower resolution compared to the one we want to use in the finished product. I think he did a great job with it, especially for the ones at higher resolution (that you are unfortunately still unable to see).

That said, we really hope that you like the way we are developing this and we also hope that you will be ready to give us your feedback. Thank you all for reading our DevLog and stay tuned for more updates!

[Heirukichi]

A new week, a new update. I am sorry for the delay, Jo was supposed to post this but he had connectivity issues these days and he is still unable to log in so I am the one writing in his stead.

Heirukichi's progress

• - Fixed a bug causing turn order to be carried on to the next battle after beating all enemies.
• - Created cursor sprite class to make skill selection easier to read.
• - Created cursor animation.
• - Fixed a bug causing the bottom part of the cursor image to be cut off when moving.
• - Added cutscene-like bars when in battle to make the transition between battle and exploration more evident.
• - Created sliding animation for cutscene-like bars.
• - Implemented a way to associate skills to items depending on their class.
• - Created a method to handle the skills associated to the selected item when in battle.
• - Improved efficiency of target selection.
• - Improved cursor and cutscene-like animations.
• - Created help window to display skill effects.
• - Added a smaller window to display skill names to the help window.
• - Created a small window to display enemy name and HP.
• - Started creating formulae to handle game-play balance.

Jo's progress

• created and animated all the Turn Order display elements

This week we can show you something in a video, even if it is not much.





Our combat system is starting to work as it is supposed to. We still have many placeholders and there is still a lot of work to do, however, testing battles is now definitely much better. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on this end.

Things we already know
- There is still no turn order display. This is something that we definitely want to add, as mentioned in our previous posts, but that is currently still missing.
- We did not show animations as we have none at the moment, the placeholder in the video is the only one at our disposal. We are already planning to create different animations for each skill so there is no need to worry about that.
- The enemy display window background is much larger than the health bar itself. This happens because we are planning to use bigger health bars for bosses/elite enemies and because we are planning to display status aliments on both sides of the enemy name. This should (hopefully) make the whole system easier to read.
- There is still no sound, we are working on that too.

Everything that is not listed in that list is something that definitely needs some feedback so feel free to voice your opinion.

Our thread reached 2000 views; thank you all for following us this far. I sincerely hope you want to stay tuned for more updates.

[JosephSeraph]

Jo's Progress

• Coloured in all of the first dungeon's monsters.

Heirukichi's Progress

• Created wrapper class to display turn order.
• Created wrapper class to display animations for each character marker in the turn order.
• Created sprite class to show units' faces in the turn order.
• Animated character faces when something affects the turn order.
• Created wrapper class to show the liquid animation that highlights the acting character.
• Adjusted liquid animation sprite so that it displays a different color for enemies.
• Fixed a bug causing the transition from one color to another to have a black frame in the middle.
• Fixed a bug causing character faces to be in an incorrect position when refreshing the turn order.
• Fixed a bug causing the liquid animation to show an incorrect frame when completing the sequence.
• Fixed a major bug causing the game to unexpectedly close after finishing a battle.
• Fixed a bug causing the turn order not to be updated when selecting a skill.

On this week's progress, Heirukichi implemented most of the graphics I created last week for the UI and I'm so excited to see it all working so smoothly!

We also brainstormed some for the length and pacing of the first dungeon, and as all monster graphics are final, the first dungeon is shaping up very nicely. This current week I'm working on making variants for the 1st dungeon's tiles, to help with the sense of space within it.

The turn order display is still going to see some minor fine-tuning: There's a visible bright blue which we're using as an alignment guide, and the way the current actor glow switches from blue to red is also getting fine-tuned.

Oh yes and before I forget, here's the finished version of one of the monsters!dont mind the doodle

Really happy with how steady we've been. Um, see you next week!

[JosephSeraph]

Heirukichi's Progress

• Created new sprite class to display target markers in the turn prediction.
• Adjusted target marker fade in and fade out speed.
• Animated coins when the respective character is being targeted in battle.
• Changed the transition between allies and enemies in the turn character border.
• Made turn character border transition brighter.
• Fixed a bug causing the target marker to be slightly shifted to the right.

Jo's Progress

• Created a Water tile and its variants for the dungeon.
• Tested color changes within different sections of the dungeon.
• Started the creation of the in-game map, based on Heirukichi's draft.

This week, we added some further polish to the battle system; we're nearing its completion and as such will very soon be moving from making the game work to actually producing content for our first prototype. I'm super excited! Things have been flowing smoothly.

Have a nice week y'all!

[JosephSeraph]

Another week, another progress report!

I have, based on Heirukichi's sketch, drafted the first dungeon's map this week but, as I had the inconvenience of 2 days with no power, had been unable to finish the in-game version of the map. It's coming along, though! It's pretty much the very last thing we have to do before being able to finally being to test the game, and that's extremely exciting.

Heirukichi's been heavy on the mechanics work lately, and we have recently settled down for a bunch of minute mechanics that hopefully will help the experience be that much more smooth and rewarding. It's incredible to see how many things we come up with when talking that I would never come up with by myself, and the disagreements will often give birth to really exciting alternatives!

Getting our hands on an actual working build of the game's first dungeon will allow us to finally test new things, and hopefully soon enough we'll be able to show it off. Thanks for sticking around!

Oh yes. I started a small Alma illustration a few days ago. I'm not sure I'll finish this as it's not relevant to the game, I just made it while thinking about the game world. Sharing it anyway!

Well, have a nice week y'all~

[JosephSeraph]

After a one week hiatus we're back, and we're finally bringing our video! Hopefully you'll enjoy seeing the game becoming something tangible as much as we do, ehe!
By the way, we'd like to welcome composer Sam Oz to the team! He's composed the awesome score featured in the video. I'm very happy to have such a talented composer on board, as well as such a talented programmer as @Heirukichi.





Quite a bit in this video is still a WIP:
   

• The footsteps are having their volume reduced.
• Combat, while functional, is yet to be databased beyond placeholder test skills. ( @Heirukichi is working on this.)
• The dungeon's layout is final, but it's lacking tile variants (as they're tied to gameplay).
• The dungeon is also lacking decoration objects, as we have discussed a specific performance-light implementation.
• The resolution of the dungeon is still a WIP.¹
• The Victory screen is a placeholder.
• The portraits are placeholders / concept artwork.
• All sound effects and battle animations are going to be replaced.
• The song will have a battle-version with pronounced drums. It's also a 6 minute long song and you couldn't hear a third of it in the video!

¹we're going to implement some level of player-control over graphics settings, which is still being talked about and is yet to be implemented. Achieving some things within the engine can be surprisingly performance intensive.

Well, time for the usual progress list

Heirukichi's Progress

• Explored different solutions for characters growth.
• Calculated interactions between solutions and breakpoints in depth.
• Drawn interactive tables to compare solutions and adjust them.
• Studied each solution advantages and disadvantages.
• Highlighted how each solution affects the game aesthetics.

Jo's Progress

• Created the 3D map within the level editor.

We both had a very dense meeting discussing character growth formulae amongst other things and we came across a slew of very interesting solutions all with very pronounced ups and downs.


I hope you enjoyed the video and will look forward to our next updates! I'm eager to show off the sidescroller town portions also, but that's still a ways off. And that's mainly because my next task within the game is... Battle Animations!

The coolest part is, I'll submit the battle animations as an asset pack too! This way you can support the development of the game and get a bunch of cool animations for your games. 

Hope I can show these off soon! Well, have a nice week and thank you for sticking around!

[Heirukichi]

Hello community, this past week we have been further improving the game balance. The main subject this time has been the experience gain. Our objective is that of allowing the player to grow past the expected level for a certain dungeon, but, at the same time, discouraging excessive grinding, because that is a kind of aesthetics that we absolutely want to keep outside of our game.

To achieve this goal, we have decided to assign experience points dynamically. After reaching a certain threshold, the player is going to earn less experience from the same enemy when leveling up, which would be a clear sign that it is about time to move on to the next dungeon. The experience gained is going to be lower and, after surpassing the threshold limit by too many levels, each enemy in a dungeon that is meant for a lower level is going to only reward the player with 1 experience point. Hopefully this will serve the purpose, but we want to hear your feedback on this as usual.

Here is a list of tasks that we completed during this week.

Heirukichi's Progress

• Studied different level progressions that fit our aesthetics and, at the same time, give us enough control on breakpoints;
• Fixed level progression to match the one obtained from the aforementioned study;
• Changed how enemies grant experience points to match the new experience curve;
• Started to modify the database to replace placeholder items with real database items (this whole process is going to take a while).

Jo's Progress

• Written the outline of the first dungeon;
• Set up tools to create better skill animations.

Hopefully, in the next post, we will be able to show you a gif of one of our new skill animations. We sincerely hope that you will like it.
Thank you for your attention and stay tuned for more updates.

P.S. Alma is definitely not going to be as OP (compared to the other characters) as she looks in the video we uploaded the last week.

[JosephSeraph]

Heirukichi's Progress

• Changed how skills affect damage to speed up the process of creating them.
• Finished adding skills to the database.
• Added each weapon available up to the first dungeon to the database.
• Linked weapons to their respective skills.
• Changed how parameters affect damage and skills strength.
• Slightly modified how certain parameters grow for certain classes to ensure a better game balance.

Jo's Progress

• Drafted all of the first dungeon's animations.
• Created 1 out of ~30 animations.
• Wrote about the party's main narrative arcs and themes.

Another week comes, and more progress in RiB comes with it. Unfortunately though, my whole family got sick this week, but we're recovering.

As promised, here's the first sneak peek of our battle animations.

Quite simple, but it was a task I had to pull off, remembering how to use Unity. 
Haven't used it in, like, 6+ months... And then only for a month, for a trailer at work. Well, well!

I actually wound up using a mixture of Unity and Blender for this which is how I'll go with them all actually. It's quite a modular animation too, with the sword slash, the core impact glow and the faint circle of mist being entirely separate elements in the pre-rendered spritesheet; I'll go with this through all the animations, hopefully that'll make them easier to make and to use.

Additionally, I had an insight this week on how to structure the dialogue and narrative in the game, and help me pinpoint a little better the stories I want to tell with each character, and how. It's really obvious in hindsight, but it's really just defining the narrative arcs each character is involved on / drives forward and how that sits within the general plot of the game.

Kind of like a timeline really, with multiple mini-timelines (the character arcs) inside, which can be semi-independent and have some level of freedom as to where these arcs play out (as in events playing out of order).

Woop that's it! Have a nice week y'all and thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

Also, I should really stop postponing the devlog until 4AM Brazilian time... LOL

[JosephSeraph]

Heirukichi's List

• Investigated a bug causing the first character to show wrong skill descriptions.
• Changed how skills and weapons are loaded into the game to get rid of the investigated bug.
• Studied game-play interactions of different ways to inflict damage over time.
• Fixed a bug triggering target selection for random-target skills even if the target was already chosen randomly.

Jo's List

• Created animations for Damage, Critical Damage, Healing, Damage over Time and Healing over Time popups.
• Created two new animations. Three complete so far.

We have made some interesting progress this week. Looking for a solution to display damage popups, we have decided to... Pre-render the animation! So the animations are baked into a spritesheet and shown with a small delay between each number. It's the easiest and simplest way to achieve this, and I was completely free to animate how I want without worrying about how to translate that to code, so I'm happy with it. Of course, some details will be animated in-engine such as the shaking for the Critical damage popup, fades, blending mode changes etc. Speaking of which, here's a sample!

Looking forward to showing it in game with the new animations. We want to indicate the attack's element and whether it hit a weakspot or it was resisted, as well. We're considering using color tints for the former, and icons for the latter, but that's still under consideration.

We also studied a few ways to go with DoT and HoT effects into the game and we decided on one that should be fun to strategize around.

The first internal prototype is pretty much done! We're moving to menus next, as I still work on the battle animations. Can't wait to show it all together!

[JosephSeraph]

Heirukichi's Progress

• Finished adding enemies to the database.
• Added extra status aliments.
• Created class to handle damage pop-ups.
• Created wrapper class for damage pop-ups to reduce memory consumption and increase performance in battle.
• Modified how pop-ups are shown based on the damage type. Damage is now clearly displayed in five (5) different ways based on it being normal damage, critical damage, healing effect, damage over time or healing over time, making it much easier for the player to understand what is going on.
• Changed how damage/healing over time works to increase the number of viable alternative strategies.
• Adjusted first dungeon map to be playable for testing purposes.
• Tested first dungeon map and took note of what has to be fixed.
• Fixed a bug causing damage to go into negative values, resulting in attacks being able to heal the target when affected by multiple strength debuffs.

Jo's Progress

• Created an assortment of Healing animations.
• Created an assortment of buff and debuff animations.

We just recently managed to produce an internal prototype of the first dungeon, playable from beginning to end, and it's super exciting. Following our playthroughs of it, we wound up with some feedback from eachother which we're working on.

Meanwhile, we add the final polishing touches to the battle system, such as adjusting damage popups and a few mechanics. I'll keep working on the battle animations on a steady pace, but starting this week we're also working on the out-of-battle menus for the game, which is currently sorely lacking for a coherent, public prototype (Something we have talked about as a possibility in the future).



This animation will look a bit different in the future -- this is the first part of a party-wide attack buff. It's currently being assigned to an all-enemy attack, because the game can't handle animations playing on the allies yet. We've decided on our last meeting that we'll have a system where we can play multiple animations simultaneously, assigned to different layers, and with different scope. So this attack buff will play a wave of power up, pictured in the gif, and afterwards, an "attack up" visual effect will play on each individual target.

I'm hoping for visual consistence here so all power up effects will look the same on the second part, but will have a different cast effect here, so it's easy to read what's happening onscreen. Oh and also, I definitely need to shrink these monsters a little!

The workflow for the battle animations has been kind of hectic. I've produced a lot of results I don't think work for the game, but I have kept them anyway because they might come in handy at some point. During this week, too, I tried to adjust myself to Blender 2.8 but I'm just too used to the internal render to really make the move, sadly.

As for me personally... Well, do y'all struggle with your waking times?
Honestly, working as a full time freelancer and gamedev, it's just so weird when you slowly sink into sleeping at 9am and waking up at 3pm. I've been trying to sync back to the mortal realm for the last few weeks to no avail, but hopefully I'll succeed today -- a lot of matcha might do the trick.

Well, have a nice weekend!


I actually sent this post as a PM to Heirukichi and had to ask him to send it back to me. Dummy me, lol

[JosephSeraph]

And so 2020 has begun. 2019 was a very bumpy year for sure, but it was also a year of starts.
And it's the year Records in Blue was born! In fact, we're just a few months away from our first development anniversary.

We took a short break during Christmas season, and m'boy was it a hectic season. But alas, our last meeting was a very interesting one, and we regrouped and discussed our strategy for tackling this year to come.

The major change you'll see is that we'll be reducing the frequency and increasing the density of our devlog posts, so it'll be one post every 14 days, but hopefully these posts will be more meaningful and interesting.
We're also submitting a Itch.io gamepage soon.

I really wish I'd interacted more with communities overall this 2020 -- be it here on Tigsource, or other communities, and I'm looking forward to doing more of that this year, but mostly, I want to sit back and celebrate how despite adversities we managed to pull this through and remain consistent on the project. With a tighter schedule on 2020, we're bound to achieve our goals! And by our goals, I basically mean finishing our projects, lol.

On my personal side as well, I'm hoping to invest tighter into my Itch.io works so you'll hopefully see more from me.

For now, we'll keep working on the UI so the game is entirely functional. I'm looking forward to show our new menu screens! And the big icons, too. On hindsight, 3d models for every item might've been a masochistic choice, but on RPGs, finding new items can be so exciting! And I want to capitalize on that excitement as much as possible.

Well, happy 2020 to all of you! May we all finish games, spend more time with our families, settle debts, advance on our love lifes and more importantly, manage to remain somewhat functional throughout the majority of this year! Working by yourself can be tough, so make sure to check up on yourself and be as organized and smart as possible. Yes I'm obviously telling this to myself.

See you soon. <3

[JosephSeraph]

Hey! Welcome to the first devlog post of 2020!

We're working at the equipment menu, currently.

To make it easier and more comfortable to the player, we decided to pretty much have an all-in-one screen that serves as the Equipment, Status and Skill menus. We may or may not have a separate inventory.
This is, of course, a mockup, but @Heirukichi has made considerable progress on the menu!

We've hit a hard wall because of our engine's limitations and @Heirukichi, along with one of his coworkers, came up with a clever solution which I'm not well equipped to explain. The wall basically has to do with memory limits and how many "3D" weapons we can store at once -- which was solved by a sort of priority queue system which, finally, lets us discard some stuff from memory without letting the player notice the generated lag.

On his end, the work on the menu, programming wise, has been full speed. Meanwhile on my end, I'm working on the 3D renders of the weapons for the inventory. I'm getting the hang of it and these are coming up faster than I expected!

These are four of the 8 currently designed weapons. They'll rotate within the menu so you can see all their angles. Hopefully they'll look like real 3D items within the game. And I hope you'll be able to manually rotate and examine them too, but that's fluff for the future.



Well, thanks for sticking'uround!
Hope y'all had a nice start to your 2020, and let's keep making fun stuff!

[JosephSeraph]

Heirukichi's Progress

• Changed how inventory windows are configured.
• Fixed a bug causing inventory windows to be displayed with an unexpected width.
• Created class to display a list of names and icons for items in the inventory.
• Fixed windows position and size to adapt them to the original mock-up

Jo's Progress

• Created, iterated and adjusted graphics for the equipment screen.

We lately have all been about the equip screen, pretty much. It's a very important part of the game, because it's pretty much all the menus you'll see (out of battle) right in there as one big screen.



This is the most up to date mockup.

As you can see you can do a lot within this screen: You can use your party's skills and items (to heal up, for example), change equipment, check character stats and the relevant skills to the highlighted weapon, as well as of course viewing the big weapon icon.

What ocurred to me as I wrote this, is that we may want room to display elemental affinities (which I already thought of a way to do that in an easy to read, but space-saving manner), however elemental affinities aren't set on stone yet -- we were a bit divergent when we discussed how to approach this mechanic a few months back, and it hasn't come into play into our design yet.

We do diverge a lot when discussing gameplay, which is particularly interesting because so many of the times, despite how frustrating divergences can be, we wind up with solutions that neither of us would've thought of otherwise, and that both of us like more than our original ideas. Pretty magical. One of the things I like most about working as a team.

Well, for the month of February, Heirukichi will continue working on the menu while I will resume working on the sidescrolling town segments -- namely, now it's the time where the first town's outside maps come into play. I'm looking forward to coming back to that.

-----

Off to a more personal note: Funnily enough, I've received a let's play of an old game of mine and a friend. This was a project crafted with a lot of love, but this build is heavily flawed, partially because we quit the project somewhat early and so the build was lacking a lot we had planned for our first dungeon, but also because of bad design and specifically lack of planning, which working with Heirukichi has taught me so much of. I'm looking forward to revisiting Owl's Nest one day, and retroactively implementing the new things I've learnt. I should try to tackle game jams again too but I'm so overworked...

Speaking of which, I've just released my Seraph Circle: Monster Pack 2 on itch.io, so check that out if you want!

Well, well. Looking forward to this february, and hopefully 2020 will at least prove to remain stable and be a reasonably productive year for everyone. Have a nice week...!