Progress update- 2020 in review

I have now moved 5 times since starting this project, including once since the last devlog (overall including crossing the Atlantic twice). Let's see if I can keep a monthly update schedule from now on... Or even bi-monthly; in the Valve way that means 'either twice a month or once every two months, we don't know yet'

In terms of release date, sometime this year. I feel like I'm at that 'permanent 80% done' point where all the pieces are there, but they need a bunch of iteration to really mesh together and feel cohesive.

Anyway, stuff! This isn't a comprehensive list of everything I've done, more of a highlight reel.

I mentally divide things into six (and a half) chapters, split into three main acts, each taking place in a different environment. I've unofficially been calling these 'Dusk', 'Dawn', and 'High Noon' because that seems thematically appropriate. I've also made the lighting of each act reflect its supposed time of day. I'm not sure I want to officially put this in the game yet, but it's definitely a thing that exists at least design-wise.

Intro/Player

New effects and outfit for player. Includes a (currently slightly jittery) procedural walk system so I don't have to make a walk cycle for every different pose.

Also, the background is a sketch of the intro/tutorial environment, not that there's much going on there at the moment.

Chapter 1

With and without the procedurally generated forest. Been messing with that as a way to quickly do background stuff- nothing actually happens in forest sections, mind you. They're just parts that either exist in the background, or the player has to walk through for a bit.

Chapter 3

Boss #3's more human half showing off some new combos/parrying behavior. This is a pretty old clip where the player's dash particles bugged out; they're not meant to be glowy cyan (the clip above with player procedural animation is more recent).

Improved beam attack from the larger opponent in boss fight #3.

Just a cool screenshot I took of boss #3 mid-motion.

Whiteboxing some of the environment between boss #3 and #4- this is meant to be a library/archives section.

Chapter 4

Some bullet hell-y stuff for boss #4.

Chapter 5

Phase 2 of boss #5 has him summoning arms from portals as extra attack effects.

Chapter 6

Boss #6- working on some leaping animations. Boss #6 is basically a giant beached jellyfish with arms stapled to it. The weird wobbly boxes on its back are some experimental stuff to try and get the tentacles on its back.

Final Boss

Final boss stuff. The combo in the second clip has been slowed down because it was pretty absurdly fast given the tools available to the player (you can also tell it's an older clip because the environment is sparser and the player has the old outfit on).

A still image of the effects on another one of the final boss's attacks.

Other Stuff

There's sound effects on everything now- I'd been adding them slowly to past stuff, and now everything has at least a placeholder audio effect.

Dialogue system got reworked to be a lot more robust. It's nothing fancy (no visual editor or anything- solo project, after all).

Boss #2 got a massive rework in its underlying mechanics for huge performance improvements (average scene FPS went from something like ~90 to ~200 in-editor), but it's still basically the same visually for now, so no clip.

Boss #1's opening cutscene stuff and dramatic death animation has been sketched out, but it's still super janky; most of the work went into the underlying functionality rather than visual stuff so far.

I've changed the rendering pipeline to URP plus Post Processing Stack v2 (previously on the legacy pipeline), which took a lot of work. It comes with a bunch of new options and performance improvements, although it also broke some compatibility with previous effects/shaders that took some work to replace. 

Also, there's ambient occlusion now. Yay?