PJ & Co

Dev Diary 123: Hunting Season

Hello, Muties! I hope you're enjoying your summer break.

It's been some time since my last dev diary. The primary reason is a two-week summer break I took to recharge, especially as we approach 2024 when a significant release is slated. For those who need a refresher, our aim is to complete the main story by the end of 2023.

Initially, the main quest centers on hunting down escaped prisoners to ensure the big, bad ODYSSEUS leaves you in peace to enjoy your ne...

Dev Diary 122: War, war never changes

Hey, mutants! I'm back with more Fallout Yesterday goodies.

Speaking of the latest additions to Hoover Dam, you can now converse with Dorris the Receptionist, find yourself incarcerated, make a daring escape, or simply spend a quiet night in jail. Moreover, you can now engage in dialogue with the Police Chief and Chief Engineer.

This update introduces a significant change regarding the Brotherhood's HQ. It is no longer directly accessible from the world map. ...

Dev Diary 121: School Time

Heya mutants, how are you doing? The temperatures are quite high where I am but that's how we like it in the wasteland.

As I mentioned recently, after finishing off with the dialog improvements, it's time to start implementing extra Hoover Dam contents. So now, the school quests are getting my attention along with the custom elevator art that connects the Rim and the Downtown. As you can see from the screenshot, the Prisoner is holding a class. There will be a couple of variations on h...

Dev Diary 120: 🚀 June Update

Hello mutants,

I hope this update finds you well. As we move further into June, it's time to share the progress we've been making on our beloved project.

First off, we have some sweet news about grammar fixes throughout the game. It's important that the game not only plays smoothly, but reads smoothly as well. We have completed the review of almost all in-game dialogs and made edits where needed. Some will need further work, especially regarding the change in game's introductory l...

Dev Diary 119: Where, what, when?

Heya mutant brothers and sisters, the middle of 2023 is here, and it's time to take a look back and see how we're progressing and where we're headed.

Currently, I am working on dialogue edits, expanding them where necessary, and implementing missing quests. For example, Gabrielle now sounds like a proper teenager. So for the next week or two, I will be fully occupied with these tasks. Once completed, I can shift my focus to adding as many new NPCs as possible to the game. My main goal i...

Dev Diary 118: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Hello my mutant brothers and sisters,

it is time for the latest news.

A bug which prevented you from talking to some NPCs was fixed. Thanks to Johnny Joe for pointing out something fishy was going on!

Additionally, I've made big progress on the intro location. What intro location you might think? Tibbets? Well, the game was never actually supposed to start immediately inside Tibbets. As Black Isle Studios devs originally planned, the player was supposed to be a prisoner at ...

Dev Diary 117: From Zero To Hero

Heya mutants, I am back with some sweet news! The game will have a stunning total of 135 unique endgame slides! Of course, not all of them will be shown at once but they are a testament to the incredible number of choices and consequences this game has. It will be fun, writing a walkthrough :)

And in other news, I am working on a workflow which could be used to animate ALL Talking Heads. In this example, you can see the reference photo which was used to create a static Talking Head. Th...

Dev Diary 116: Well now, it was just a matter of time

Hello muties,

some great news galore this time around! As some of you probably noticed, Fallout Yesterday uses Talking Heads from other mods or from other projects our resident THs artist Goat-Boy is working on. Those borrowed THs were always meant to be temporary placeholders because this game deserves to have its own unique art. But due to its size, realistically we would need an army of artists working around the clock to produce all the THs. However, there is light at the end of the...

Dev Diary 115: How it started, how it's going

Heya muties,

it's PJ with the latest update on our beloved game. I've spent the last few weeks going over dialogs, adding missing topics, coding a mega quest with at least 6 different ways to complete and testing all of it. Hoover Dam has 22 quests in total so there's still a good few to finish but I am happy with the progress. The more code and dialogs I write, the faster it goes. 

In other news, you might have noticed sfall was last time updated 7 months ago. Not sure when/...

Dev Diary 114: Patrolling the Mojave

Hi mutants,

I hope you are all well. For the last few weeks, I've been working on dialogs, quests, in-game cutscenes and scripting for Hoover Dam.

Lots of NPCs are there, both civilian and military, so I want to do my best to bring them to life. And during testing I've found and fixed a number of bugs which slipped through the cracks earlier.

There's an annoying one that happens with the turrets NCR is using to mow down the BOS troops. They refuse to fire and the ...

Dev Diary 113: Untitled

Heya muties, 

hope you are doing well. I was away for a week on a business trip but now I'm back continuing to work on Hoover Dam dialogs and quests. As you can see this dude likes his whiskey a lot but is friendly enough to share. Guess what? He is one of the people running the place. Yes, it will be interesting to see how the Prisoner will change the place. To be or not to be? To try fixing it or turning it into the booze capital of the wasteland? Yes, we will have fun either way...

Dev Diary 112: Those new people

Heya mutants, it's been a while since I've reached out with the latest wasteland news. First thing first, all the best in 2023! Let's hope this will be a big year for Fallout Yesterday!

I've been working on 24 Hoover Dam NPCs at the moment. Some are less, some are  more important but they all have a voice of their own and a reason to be in the Dam. The 24 is not a total list, there will be even more of them there, but what I wanted to add first is a new companion so you can travel...

Dev Diary 111: Are you talkin’ to me?

Heya mutants, it has been quiet here but for a good reason. I was writing for Hoover Dam as well as reading. Reading, you wonder? Well, I always felt writers subconsciously give most of their characters the same “voice” so I wanted to expand my vocabulary, styles, grammar and find some new voices for NPCs. Just like in the real world, no two persons talk the same.

Now that I am happy with the ew dialogs I moved onto coding Hoover Dam quests!

In the meantime I found an odd bu...

Dev Diary 110: Where are the people

Heya mutants, so here we are with a milestone behind us. The map work for Hoover Dam has been finalized!! It’s a big, big location and I hope you will have great time exploring it. I had to make two extra quests locations but now it’s time to start adding the NPCs. Their dialogs are mostly finished so now it’s down to writing the code. I look forward to finally bringing the locations to life starting with the entrance gate and then making our way down the Dam. I think I will start with ...

Dev Diary 109: That can't be healthy

Heya mutants,

here's a picture of some nice acid pools to show what I am working on right now.
After I finish this Hoover Dam location, there is one more left. It will be good for a change to finally go back to coding NPCs and quests. You've been so patient with me but it's a huge, huge game. Not saying that as a bad thing, I think we all love the fact Van Buren is a beast that dwarfs Fallout 2 in size :D

See you next time,

-PJ

Dev Diary 108: Going for a walk

Heya mutants,

as you can see from the screenshots, there has been huge progress on the external Hoover Dam locations. Beside some scenery and minor polishing to be done, I'm happy enough to move onto the remaining internal locations and wrap it up! Those are about 50% done. After that I will start bringing the city to life with its many NPCs and quests.

See you soon with screenshots of the Dam's internal locations. 

Regards,

-PJ

Dev Diary 107: The descent

Hello mutants, a quick update with progress on Hoover Dam's Downtown as well as the Government's HQ. It's a huge area which would take about 50 or so screenshots to cover it all so I bring you some interesting ones with details.

Besides continuing on implementing that, I will keep adding music in high quality during this week. See you soon with more Hoover Dam news.

-PJ

Dev Diary 106: Music To My Ears

Heya mutants,

while I am working on Hoover Dam, I am also in the process of updating the quality of game music. I think that the legacy ACM format is long overdue with its 16-bit, 22050 Hz format. So far I updated 22 songs with more on the way.

While I am at that, I will be adding new music too! That includes exclusive songs composed by our own team member "1982"

Music was always, very, very important to the unique atmosphere of the world so it is crucial this gets as muc...

Dev Diary 105: The Rim Puzzle

Heya mutants,

finally the Hoover Dam Rim milestone has been reached! The huge location-specific art which was broken into many smaller pieces due to the engine's limitations has been connected. This has been a real pain and struggle to get done but here we are :D In addition, the North Gate area is also finished!

So what's next you might wonder.. well, the Hoover Dam Downtown of course! Although even bigger than the Rim, I think it should be finished faster because the Rim was s...

Dev Diary 104: The North Side Story

Hello mutants,

work is continuing around the north exit of the Dam. Can you recognize our favorite caravan company? There's lots more buildings around it in this part of town. I didn't want to leave out any extra details that were originally planned such as the surrounding citizen homes.

In addition, sfall was updated to version 4.3.7 which includes the following changes:

>Dropped support for older pre-SSE processors in favor of more optimized code. Now sfall requires a p...

Dev Diary 103: The West Side Story

Hello mutants,

I am back with a quick update on our favorite dam. Work is under way in the west side of the Dam. Police HQ, Caravan HQs, the Bar and a couple of other buildings of interest are there so it will be a fun, quest-heavy area to visit.

I like the area a lot as it houses the NCR power-players in the NCR-BOS war so it needs to reflect that visually and acoustically, not only through writing. I am actually drawing from my own experience of war I lived through in my childho...

Dev Diary 102: Found it… sort of!

Heya mutants, as you recall I was trying out various ways to merge the isometric buildings and rounded shapes of the Dam and have found it! It works the best if I follow the concept art and make the Rim a bit more like Junktown, irregular and makeshift in its essence. Which makes sense since the NCR settled in and used what they found lying around to build a new town.

There’s one downside to the cool houses spread along the Dam in that concept art - they’re not quite defi...

Dev Diary 101: Progress...ing

Hey mutants, how are you doing?

It's been a quiet few weeks as I continued working on Hoover Dam's dullest part - aligning hundreds of pieces that are used to display it in all its glory. It's all technical, time-consuming work. I change the art piece's XY offsets and then check inside Mapper if it's pixel-precise or needs more editing. Rinse and repeat.

Another thing that has been giving me slight headache is the creative/technical challenge on how to properly display isometric b...

Dev Diary 💯 : Tackling the Big One

Heya mutants, hope you are doing swell!

Where I am right now it’s very, very hot. And I wish for a nuclear winter. Oh wait, wrong game!

Anyways, what I have been working on lately is something I refer to as tackling the Big One aka Hoover Dam. It has the biggest art pieces, loads and loads of NPCs, quests and locations. The dialogs are done, the art is done, the locations are (almost) done. Not to mention some sweet new Talking Heads were made! Now I am writing the code and put...

Dev Diary 99: Expanded Areas

Hello mutants, how are you?

As some of you already know, I relocated to my home country and have settled in. I am much happier now being close to my family. And so are they 😃

As promised, I added more content to the game. Three areas got expanded: City Ruins surrounding the Boulder Dome, Jericho’s southern entrance and Grand Canyon with an old miner town settlement.

There are no more areas to be added at the moment so I can go back to ad...

Dev Diary 98: On the move

Heya mutants, just a quick update to let you know that I am moving back to my home country next week to live with my family!

It has been quiet here for the last two weeks as organising everything took up all the free time.

Expect the regular updates to resume in June, with the first two catching up on the last two weeks and delivering plenty of content 😃

-PJ

Dev Diary 97: Give me that atmosphere

Hey mutants, here's something different this week for you. Something to build up the atmosphere. A new music track by our talented composer 1982!

Enjoy!

Dev Diary 96: Perky Part II

Heya mutants,

long time no see! We are still focused on implementing the missing Traits and Perks, mainly from Van Buren, Fallout Tactics and Arcanum Backgrounds. Most of these are not supported by the engine out of the box so we need to find clever ways to make them work.

And I think some aren’t suitable for implementation, such as those intended only for Deathclaws in Fallout Tactics. But maybe we could implement them and explain them as mutations.

What do you guys think...

Dev Diary 95: Perky

Heya mutants,

hope you are enjoying the spring time!

As some of you have probably noticed, there was no update last week. We are at the moment working on implementing lots of new and complex Perks.

So last week all of our dev time was spent researching how to best fit those into Fallout 2 engine. And now we are transforming all that into programming code. The new Perks come from Van Buren Design Docs and the Pen and Paper version as well as Fallout Tactics. Quite a number o...

Dev Diary 94: Back to coding

Hello mutants!

Hope you all had a great week!

We are back to coding and have made updates related to the main story and some of its influence on the gameplay. So a new background mechanic is now part of the game which tracks down the player’s behaviour.

This info is then used to make some decisions regarding NPCs in the world but those will become more evident the longer you play.

For now, I don’t want to spoil too much but I expect to hear about it from people mo...