Monday Milestones + Mini DevLog

Heyhey and welcome to a Helltaker Edition of the Monday Scientific Research Journal of ANBW!

AUDIO VERSION ATTACHED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST

I wanted to make sure that outside of my chat interactions with some of you we have some info on the general progress towards the next build out there. At the end of this post you can find a more in Depth description of the general production goals we have right now. As usual: If unsure about something, ask a question. I´m always around to answer them <3

Here's what the full crew is up to:

• Finish current Update on Isekai to VLT Cinematic

• Continue work on Sub-Chapter 10

• Head pat Update Melody

• Combat Montages Update

• Update to the combat system back-end to make it easier to maintain files and code

• Finishing up the current Combat Polish Pass (There is a lot more to do but that is a problem for after the next release)

• Addressing the infinitely long List of required Updates to OCD (Our Game Design and Storytelling System)

• Sub-Chapter 38 completion and review

• Sub-Chapter 38 Mini-Game meeting for mechanics, get ready for a crazy experience

• Wrapping up writing on Chapter 6

• Documenting Character Expressions & Intents for all Sub-Chapters in Chapter 6 so our characters have the right expression when talking

• Aoi Dating Timeline Continue

• Steam Achievements

• Recovery
  

  

• Social Media Asset Creation so we can keep posting cool science stuff!

• Tidying up and expanding Internal Lore Doc

• Aoi Dating Timeline Review

• Sub-Chapter 10 Juicy Scenes Quality Reviews

• Designing Blair's Lab Module's main art flow

• Aoi Swimsuit Showcase Pics

• Aki Swimsuit Materials Setup

• Cerberus LB Showcase Pics

• Starting 3D Pass on Arena Announcer

• Aki & Aoi Weapon Props

• More Citizen/NPC Outfit Concept.

• Character Skinning and Merged Meshes: Non critical issue cleanup after rapid fire change propagation on character meshes

• Sandbox: Character Body Language

• Sandbox: more reliable Scene Restoration from Creator Saves

• Sandbox: Polish Physics Asset

• Polish Subchapter 10 Sandbox Scenes

• Update Subchapter 7 System32 Encounter

• Review new Blair's lab environment with design team and update motion paths to match to it

• Play test and polish subchapter 10

• Wrapping up Tutorial Rework

• Combat Gameplay Testing

• Wrapping up Subchapter 10 Game Design Pass

• Cleaning Up the Code Base and fixing issues arising from the cleanup

  Mini DevLog

  Heyhey Scientist, I see you made it to the bottom of this journal. As you can probably tell at this point, our latest release has been a little while ago. To make sure we have some needed clarity on why that's the case I'm going to present our process of development over the years and go a bit into how it has been adapting since then.
  
  Over the years our main priority was always to keep pushing the boundary on what a small team can deliver in a short amount of time. While that resulted in a lot of short term progress it came at a cost -> Code Debt / Production Asset Debt.
  
  But: "Why give a shit about some code Debt? I want the game NOW!" and while I am totally on board with that need for speed as a gamer myself, its a bit like running with your shoelaces tied together, just a matter until you trip and fall in a way that makes it very hard to stand up again. One very recent example that made it clear that the removal of the existing code debt was absolutely necessary, was that we had a ton of so called circular dependencies within our blueprint assets. And while in C++, which we use for some of our more intricate systems, we would be warned about this, Blueprints in UE5 do not really give a damn about telling you about circular refs which can lead to data corruption & loss. And we DID face issues like this every now and then, scratching our heads why something was broken or lost data. In general its not that big of a deal if you know what to avoid, but yeah Unreal at least does not give you any information about when that is happening and the only remaining choice is to simply clean up your workflows and avoid certain actions, even if you can "technically do it", completely.
  
  Fast Development always means you skip and issue here or there, just so you're able to keep pushing new content. Generally I am very much in favor of doing it that way when doing PRE ALPHA and ALPHA builds, because then and there polish just does not make any sense. During the last years we tried figuring out what works, which systems we can reliably use, how to keep scaling our production capacity and much more. Obviously with the goal to get this, I´d say, somewhat complex production into a state where it can head towards a release.
  
  And with that thought of "heading towards a full release" in mind,internally my measurement for timelines, that I so far oriented our production on, was always roughly the 3-5 years other larger games take to develop. In GENERAL I was and am very aware that forming a new team like we did aaaand building the entire production timeline from scratch adds a bit of extra time to this, but yeah, that's the general time-frame I always used to determine if we are or aren't progressing fast enough.
  
  The main goal I had set for 2024 was to fully stress test our systems to see how fast we could develop our Sub-Chapters and cut everything off / or trade in systems for other solutions that ended up slowing us down. And that's what we did. Additionally we already had for a long time been discussing, that we needed to clean up our code base and production assets, in order to ensure we had less chances to fail at the following production sprints. And while 2024 was packed with upgrading and adapting our pipelines and workflows, we ended the year with starting that long overdue cleanup pass.
  
  And oh boi its been a wild ride since then. We decoupled, un-referenced, implemented interfaces, removed old code, adapted workflows further and even implemented our first major character optimization system (A distance based loading / unloading with proper reconstruction).
  
  While this cleanup phase took quite a bit longer than I think anyone had originally bargained for, I am certain / convinced that it is the best possible investment we could have made for this game, to ensure a healthy production baseline.
  
  Finally one good thing I want to point out that you might have noticed though: While we did not release a build lately because of the cleanup pass, obviously the actual art content pipeline has been pushing along all the while, completely ignoring the issues we were resolving. Which is great because it means the following Sub Chapters already have a considerable amount of art buildup that we can use to quickly block in the entirety of Chapter 2 as soon as the next build drops :3 :3
  
  So, question time: Is there anything else that I should clarify / explain? I'm looking forward to answering your questions in the comments below. Or on discord <3
  
  As always: Thanks for your support, thanks for your patience & passion and hopefully you have great rest of your day / week!