Working hard on environment polish. Filling things in mainly with decals rather than adding more meshes. I built something that lets me type text directly onto walls without creating new decal images each time, keeping memory, performance, and decal resolution in check. But actually placing them — making them visible enough without overdoing it, keeping them relevant to the game — turned out to be much harder than I expected. Once the workflow becomes more of a pattern, I should be able to move faster. At the same time, I’m reinforcing the lighting with bounce light and adding fog to the outdoor areas.
I came across the news that Director Itagaki Tomonobu passed away last year. I loved Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2. That spicy, addictive flavor that keeps you coming back. There was something vicariously satisfying about the way he dressed like a rocker and gave interviews with that unapologetic arrogance. I think I might have seen him once at E3 or an MS party, I’m not sure. It felt very different from hearing about a famous celebrity or politician passing. He wasn’t even that old. A lot of thoughts.
Building the boss was so draining, but after about a day of rest, getting into assembly and working through feedback put me back into my usual pace. Two players have been incredibly helpful — sending gameplay footage and filing a ton of bug reports. The direct fixes help a lot, but what’s even more valuable is the inspiration. Watching gameplay footage especially — seeing how a player reacts at a certain point makes me think, “ah, that’s what they’re feeling here, so I should change it like this.” Those moments usually share two traits: I already knew something was off but couldn’t figure out how to fix it, and the solution ends up being simple, not complex. Still need to see how the changes play out, but thanks to these players, the game got meaningfully better. Truly grateful.
Alongside that, I’m replacing placeholders and working through overall polish. I reworked the 350 Archetype server room as shown above. Beyond that, I’m going through the earlier sections — fixing lighting, filling in empty spots, tightening up loose areas. Once the environment polish is in a good place, I’ll move into story revisions.
Somehow managed to finish the first pass. The list of things to fix, refactor, and add is enormous, but I think everything that needed to be designed from scratch is done.
To reward myself for finishing, I visited a place called Museum SAN(山, Mountain). Since so much of what I build has to be indoors, I’ve become very interested in physical spaces wherever I go. The artworks on display were impressive, but the exhibition spaces themselves were remarkable. Of the three things that stuck with me the most, one was a spiral staircase whose horizontal cross-section is a Reuleaux triangle — a triangle made of circular arcs. A normal spiral staircase would feel claustrophobic, and a perfectly round one might feel dizzying or unsettling, but this triangular spiral felt genuinely smooth and impressive. Another was a second-floor gallery that doubled back almost to where you came from, forming a sharp point — and I realized you’d never see a shape like that outside of a mountain trail. More than just “a master architect built this,” it felt like the building itself was speaking. The last was a dome-shaped ceiling with an opening, like the roof of the Pantheon. What made it special was how sound reflected inside — my own voice came back from above my head sounding like someone else’s. Mathematically it might be nothing remarkable, but experiencing it in person, with light pouring through the opening, was something else. The reason I’m writing about this here is because I want to try recreating spaces like these in the game. One thing I’ve been thinking while making this game is that if I’d known about architecture, I might have gone in that direction. I enjoyed the work of conveying feeling through spaces and the flow between them, and I enjoyed experiencing it too. Of course, coming from a completely different field, this is all at a beginner’s level of appreciation.
Anyway, assembly finally begins. The story has been coming together in my head and I’ve been wanting to get it properly in place, along with cleaning up all the placeholders. But I know once I start, it’ll be the usual — this is hard, my brain won’t cooperate, I can’t think — crawling through the work. Still, the end is genuinely in sight.
Polishing the boss model and wrapping up the FX for the last phase. I thought I could finish this week, but the task list keeps growing. The good news is it’s growing slower. It’s all presentation debt. For example: the boss goes berserk and flings its armor plates, which embed in the walls and become platforms. Things I hadn’t put on the list — like the FX for armor bursting off the body, or the FX for it slamming into the wall. Sometimes I wonder if pouring two months into this is even worth it. How many people are actually going to see this? But when you’re making something alone, looking for value outside yourself means you can’t do anything at all. It’s exactly like alchemy — the goal is finishing the game, but what you actually gain is an investigation and understanding of your inner reality.
Finished the boss modeling and textures for now. Decided to polish later and move on to combining everything with the boss mechanics I’ve built so far to wrap it up. It’s taken so long and been so draining that I don’t even feel excited about finishing. Just tired. I figure the feeling will come back once I start polishing from the beginning and eventually reach the end and play through it.
I finally lost to the placeholder boss. Even though the remaining work is simple, I just couldn’t push through, so I took a break and worked on some game feature updates.
Kay visibility: I made Kay’s scarf much longer and gave it a color that really pops. I went back and forth on what color to use, but thinking about Kay’s personality, disposition, and role, white felt right. Some users suggested jiggle bones or kawaii physics, which I interpreted as wanting physics-driven objects to stand out more — it’s a little ironic that it’s harder to understand what users mean when they use dev terminology than when they just describe how they feel. Anyway, I also increased the emissive value on the scarf material when the camera pulls back, so it reads better at a distance. Cranking emissive up close looks unnatural.
Attune: I added a feature to read information from the environment, like reading signs. I thought it might help emphasize the game’s mood, and more importantly, I needed another way to deliver story in the threshold — the existing methods weren’t enough for various reasons. It’s a secondary feature though, completely optional for progression.
Photo mode: while Kay looks at photos of her daughter, the player can take screenshots from a distance.
I also finished some of the gameplay for the boss’s final phase, but I think I need to swap out the placeholders for proper models before doing any more polish.
For full assembly, I’ll probably need to rewrite most of the story-related text from scratch. A lot of the dialogue was written while the story was still being built, so there are gaps and parts that no longer match. This is exhausting — I need to figure something out. I think I’ve been going at full throttle for too long. I need to start managing my energy better going forward.
Third phase of the last boss. That effect is 3 seconds long and took a week. One day went to getting a wisdom tooth pulled, about a fifth of another went to helping around the house while my wife wasn’t feeling well, and a day or two was lost to going down the wrong path. I initially exported the floor as skeletal animation from 3ds Max, advancing the animation incrementally — but with around 350 pieces, the framerate tanked. The thing is, what I actually wanted was a shockwave-driven collapse, not a physics animation. Completely wrong approach. So I just made 5 static meshes representing stages of the collapse, swapped between them, and hid the transitions with FX. For the tell effect, I went back and forth before landing on a slightly anime-inspired look. I put some care into the lens flare to keep it from looking too anime. Lens flares can’t afford to look low-res, but using a massive texture just for that felt wasteful, so I handled most of it in the material. I took a crunchy 256×256 lens flare texture, scaled it up with blur, then drew sharp radial black lines from the center in the shader to fake a high-res look. Not completely happy with the quality, but moving on for now.
I’ve been building nothing but bosses for almost three months, and staring at that placeholder tin can for over a month is making me sick. I want to finish this and get into full assembly. That’s how tedious this stretch is — I’m already thinking about the next game and the one after that. I mean, I am working hard, so why is progress this slow. Next up: the boss’s armor plates blow off and embed in the ground, and the player has to step on them to dodge shockwaves and lasers, get close to the boss, and destroy the core. I keep going back and forth — am I overscoping this because it’s the last boss, or does the last boss deserve this much effort? My head’s a mess.
Every evening I browse through the discovery queue and category pages, looking at games with surprisingly (relatively) strong numbers or ones with great visuals but unexpectedly low numbers. If there’s a demo, I play it. I’ve done this about 5,000 times by now. Here are some scattered thoughts from what I’ve noticed.
It’s hard to find any fixed rules among games that sold in the 1k–50k range. The usual advice — your capsule should look like this, you need an early UX hook — I can’t really see any of that mattering here.
But around the 10k mark, capsule quality does seem to hold up to a certain standard at least.
What matters far more is fit. The game needs a point that can’t be scratched by anything else, and it needs to reach the players who care about that. The latter is especially critical. The former isn’t something you can easily manufacture — it seems to be decided when the game is born. It can develop and evolve during production, but even that feels like it was baked in from the start.
So what’s the most important factor in achieving that fit for games in this range? Luck, I think. If you’re at least posting dev logs and entering Next Fest, luck does come around once or twice, big or small. That’s where the old saying applies: “be ready when luck comes.”
The “readiness” here seems to be playability and build stability. This is one of the few areas that can actually be improved through effort.
I’ve also seen games with major publishers and impressive visuals that sold shockingly poorly.
The ratio of self-published games among those with meaningful numbers was higher than I expected. Just a feeling, though.
So what’s my conclusion?
Increase iteration speed, ship faster, release more often — to test different game hooks.
Without dropping quality — so I’m ready when luck comes.
Nearly done with the second phase of the last boss. That was genuinely hard. A lot of things didn’t work the way I expected, and what I could see was wrong didn’t always match what I felt was wrong, which made it confusing and easy to get lost. Now heading into the third and final phase. Truly the last of the last. Of course, once the last phase is done I still need to design the boss visually, but that should be less of a maze than the gameplay side.
I keep thinking about what I want to make for the next project, which I guess means this one really is in its final stretch. Even though there’s still 2–3 months of work left including the boss, plus testing and polish after that. Games I want to play keep coming up too, but my PC can’t keep up anymore — and computer prices have gotten so high I can’t even consider buying one. Never thought I’d be in this spot.
Finished building the weak point for the last boss, T6, and got the player able to attack it. The original design had no direct combat — the player would interact with devices on the boss’s body to destroy it while parkouring up. It’s shifted into something closer to a traditional action game boss now. Next up is the phase transition: when it gets back up, the shredders on its arms swap out for something else and it starts doing absurd attacks. I want to get the boss done and move into full assembly. The story is locked in, all the elements are in place, and I can finally replace all the placeholders — though there’s a good amount of polish ahead. Hoping to wrap up around summer and start testing. I found out a bit late that the world is a sea full of nothing but manchineel islands. Not sure it would have made much difference even if I’d known sooner. It’d be nice to be an iguana that can happily eat manchineel fruit, but I wasn’t one. So I got on a raft and headed out to sea. I don’t know the faces or names of the people who enjoy my game, but maybe because of that, sometimes they feel like people on the same boat, and sometimes like the wind pushing it forward. That’s what my gratitude toward players means. Even if it never reaches them, it’s something I feel.
Still working on the last boss. The gameplay is gradually shifting from the original plan, but I’m liking this direction better. Unlike the previous one, this one’s design is tightly tied to the gameplay, so I’m building the gameplay first with a mock-up. Going through the core elements one by one — the boss’s basic attacks are mostly done, and next up is building its weak points. The legs are handled procedurally, so even if the quality takes a small hit, it made the animation work much easier.
The weather got hot out of nowhere. I thought my room would stay cool, but the moment the temperature went up it betrayed me. The monitors make it even worse. I have a circulator running but it’s not doing much — just adding noise. If it’s already like this, I have no idea how I’m going to survive the actual summer.
