DevLog #11

It’s been a while since I did one of these larger devlogs. 

As of writing this, I actually had to go back and check the last one to really process what all has gone on since then!

*checks*

Yeah... so the last one was back in October! 

Might be best if I bullet some highlights for myself (and as a preemptive TL;DR summary for this blog post):

• The Game Awards - Future Class nomination
• Interview with the MIX and Humble BGDF
• 2 New Teaser videos were released demonstrating combat and visual overhaul
• Completed a prototype demo, a major milestone
• Team size has increased!
• Multiple character design reworks and animation process improvements
• Completed model sheets and sprite bases for all characters
• Pile (and others) got a voice!
• That was a fun April Fool’s Joke
• Demoed at TFF and FWA!
• Processing Demo Feedback
• Completed a first pass of core gameplay code refactoring
• Breeze Plush?!

The Game Awards - Future Class Nomination

I was nominated as an “Individual who represents the bright, bold, and inclusive future of video games” at The Game Awards back in November! 

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with a lot of cool peeps and learning things that have helped a lot in the last few months, including feedback on the game and how we develop things!

Around this same time, I dropped two teaser videos, demonstrating gameplay from our prototype demo, as well as some live gameplay being shown during the a MIX livestream!

Completed a Prototype Demo, a Major Milestone

This one was pretty big for us, thanks to Humble’s BGDF and the support of Patrons and others that have helped out along the way, we were able to get a LOT of progress done, and met many of the goals we were striving for:

• Getting a solid combat system together
• Getting some good physics and game-feel figured out
• Establishing the visual direction of the game
• Figuring out how to handle animations and cutscenes
• Actually tying things together (crazy how things went from “bunch of detached stuff” to “wow, a game? how that happen?!”

There’s still a LOT of work to be done, but it’s nice to also have something to look back on and go “ok, this but MORE”.

The inevitable Patreon question: “WHEN WILL I GET TO TRY IT?!”

There are things that I need to tackle first before I can share another build, so the wait will unfortunately be a little longer, but if you happen to catch me at a convention, I’ll more than likely have a build on me (shoutout to Steam Deck for existing)

Team size has increased!

So pretty much within the last 8-12 months, we’ve went from 1-2 animators to now 6-7!

We’re forecasting to need at least 700+ animations in the game (with counts of misc. things pending). These includes all kinds of character actions, each being around 0.5 - 2 seconds in duration.

Each animation will need to be properly:

1. Planned and designed
2. Vetted and voted
3. Roughed
4. Cleaned
5. Colored
6. Exported
7. Imported in engine
8. Configured in engine

It’s a lot of work if you can’t tell, and a few hands have to touch each one, this includes character designs as well (which we have around 4 of). This area might grow a little more, but until then, things are progressing well on the animation front.

One thing that has helped a lot was wrapping up the process of converting all character designs into a sprite and animation friendly style! This meant creating a lot of turnarounds, making design tweaks and even a few entire reworks of some characters! 

In the end, this did result in making sure we carefully considered how some designs would influence the amount of work needed for each character.

Music as also ramped up some as well, but I was told to wait on that front because they want to show off of course, so I conceded. (It’ll be worth it though, I promise)

April Fools Joke

I really enjoyed the one that we did this year! Quite honestly, this one was a rather last minute than normal, mostly cause we were busy working on the actual game, so yeah….

Anywho, definitely used it as an opportunity to do some reveals, such as Shock, the storm rabbit, and Pile’s voice being revealed! 

It was very fun editing the video, despite having to learn a LOT about Adobe Premiere to actually get it done. But with all thing gags, we come out of it learning something new :)

TFF and FWA

I decided last minute to show up at Texas Furry Fiesta (a local con for me), mostly as an excuse to get out the house and to get a chance to let people try out our demo.

Honestly, I was a bit worried the first day or two in that I didn’t get as many visitors as I was expecting, and was also a bit livid because my laptop’s GPU silently failed and I couldn’t hook it up to a TV.

LUCKILY! My steam deck has arrived a few days beforehand and I was testing out getting the demo to work on it, so I’m glad I actually brought it with me, or I would have been fairly out of luck! 

I think it also helped catch a lot of people’s attention as there aren’t too many of them out in the wild yet, so I can happily say that I’ve given many folks their first opportunity to try out the Steam deck via our demo!

FWA gave me a reason to fly out to Atlanta (where I grew up and went to school/college) and man, forgot how humid and allergy invoking that place is! 

Once more, I managed to get a LOT of people to play the demo, and with that received a LOT of positive feedback, as well as a lot of notes and stuff to take back and process. (Someone even pulled out a fightstick, so now gotta figure out how to make that work now i guess lol)

What’s going on right now?

Earlier this week, we wrapped up our first post-demo major refactor!

In an effort to get the demo done, we obviously had to do some thangs. So of course, we need to make those thangs into much more manageable and production worthy. We will be continue to work on making code more modular, readable and accessible to front end tools that will allow for more configuration friendly things to be done without always having to jump into the code directly to do it.

Some examples below demonstrate a state machine, as well as event configuration for common in-game things. Each "node" representing a method, or series of code that activates when you enter into it.

This should hopefully help speed up implementing new gameplay features, setting up attacks, configuring animations, and more. We’ll also be seeing about utilizing more tools when possible to speed up other areas, such as audio and rendering effects!

Breeze Plush?!

So! The cute Breeze plush that you might have see on Twitter that we’ve work on making happen for about 4-5 months now? It’s available on Makeship for about another week! If you haven’t seen it already, here it is:

As usual, it will help fund development, while also giving you yet another cute thing to put on your desk/stand/shelf/canopy/bed/idk where else.

Wow, okay, I can’t believe I finished writing all of that.

A couple of other housekeeping things regarding Patreon:

I’m going to doing some updates to the Patreon page, more-so to update it to match the current state of things (such as probably seeing if I can change the page’s name from my name to my company’s name: Stormy Nights, because official business and all).

Making it say “Stormy Nights is creating Breeze in the Clouds game” seems much more accurate these days, I’m not doing everything myself.

I'm looking to change the tiers up as well (after I account for all of the existing/previous Patrons),  since we’ve mostly hit our "original" demo goal (aside from aforementioned work that needs to be done) and the next goal really being project completion, therefore, converting it into an even more official tip jar.

I will need to keep to a cadence of 1-2 posts a month for a while, with some sprinkles of extra mini posts when possible. I'll look to do a mix of animation, coding and gameplay when possible (we're at that stage where things break at anytime). 

This will allow me to create more quality posts and not suffer from needing to find something shareable 3-4 times a month (especially as the game progresses and me wanting to avoid spoiling too much). I hope this won’t be a problem!

As always, thanks for reading and for your support!