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Boss patterns are mostly done. Hit reactions, tuning, and phase assembly are next. Video work every week means dev progress is slower than I’d like. I submitted something with a different feel than before to a game show. It’s exclusive so I can’t share it yet, but I’ll post it separately whether it gets in or not. Too much work went into it to just sit on it. Building bosses has always been the hardest part for me, and it still is. One more to go after this and I’m not sure when I’ll get to it. It’s not that it’s difficult — it’s more that this one part of dev feels a bit removed from what I enjoy. I love making games, but actually building out the bosses is the one piece that gets to me. Anyway, still grinding away at it.

I tried diversifying my social media a bit by posting a YouTube video in a new style, but it didn’t really work. I also tried a shorts with a different style, but the response was worse than usual. Oof. YouTube is probably going to stay an archive for me. Making the videos, uploading, and responding to comments took 2-3 days out of the week.

The final boss of the Threshold is still moving, slowly. The idea here is to make Bulletwalk a central part of the fight, both using it and figuring out how to recharge it. About two patterns left, I think. There’s still player hit detection, AI, and tuning to do.

Even so, after about five years of development counting the previous game, things are starting to accumulate — pipelines, code, whatever — that I can reuse going forward, and that makes the work feel worthwhile. UE4.27 is getting comfortable in my hands. UE5 feels too heavy for my machine and I don’t trust my optimization skills, so I’m imagining maybe switching to UE6 someday after I make enough money to upgrade my computer. Or I might just stay on 4.27.

Boss work will probably keep moving slowly next week too, since I’ll be preparing a video for a game show submission. It’s my first time trying. We’ll see if they take it.

Last month, various metrics for the game suddenly deteriorated, so I tried to avoid looking at anything as much as possible. Then, I went in to see if I should change the tags and was shocked. The ‘Parkour’ tag, which I had added to better describe the game, was banned by users. I thought it was parkour if it included wall jumps and wall running. However, it seems that parkour basically refers to a genre like racing, where you run quickly to a destination without falling or with a time limit, and because of this, users expect an absolutely seamless, smooth flow. So, for now, I have completely removed ‘parkour’ from the game description and tags. It made me wonder if this was the reason the numbers were like that. The game doesn’t seem to have anything particularly unusual, yet it’s in an ambiguous position to explain, so I struggled and tried using the word ‘Parkour’, but I didn’t expect this to happen.

After seeing the sudden drop in social media impressions last time, I felt I needed to come up with a solution, so I prepared a video to try something on a new social media platform and my existing YouTube channel. It is a gameplay video where I pick one area, show hidden things, and explain them. I have no idea how it will turn out because it is my first time making a slow-paced video with a larger context like this. Therefore, I first asked for opinions only from the community that has helped me the most. I don’t know how much interest and feedback they will give, but they are the community that has provided the most help so far.

Other than that, I am still working on the boss. Bosses really require a lot of work. And as I make them, it seems that every time I create a new boss, I often have to build many of the necessary functions from scratch instead of reusing existing ones. So it seems to take more time. I made the missiles the boss shoots and the ability to kick the missiles. For now, the video only shows the scene where the boss shoots. The kicking needs to be fully connected to the boss’s armor breaking.

I am working on a boss. Progress feels incredibly slow. It feels like I have almost reached the top of the mountain, but I am crawling up drained of energy.

The impressions on the social media I run have suddenly dropped by over 95% since last week. It seems the algorithm has changed, and since this is a repeat of what I experienced last year, I feel at a loss and frustrated. Without a clear guide or proper alternatives, the fact that I have to be unilaterally swayed by the system as a solo developer is deeply exhausting. For the time being, I will have to adjust my posting frequency or videos and look for other channel alternatives. I know it is a mountain I must accept and adapt to. After all, if there is a mountain, you must either climb it or go around it. But it is truly overwhelming at times.

The boss in the attached video is the final boss of ‘Threshold’. I plan to start with three patterns: shooting sword beams from the air, scattering missiles, and sweeping across the ground.

I have roughly finished the final area. I put a puzzle at the very end of the area, but I felt it was not quite right, so I removed it and am working on a boss. It is a waste to discard the puzzle I made, so I plan to move it to another location.

Below is the boss currently being modeled. It is a type that attacks while flying in the air, but looking at it after making it, it resembles a Chocobo, so it looks like it cannot fly. I will keep modifying it as I continue making it.

It takes me a long time to make a boss. I think it is because the modeling, animation, and behavior patterns are all exclusive to them. So originally, I was going to make two more bosses, but I thought about making only one more and tried filling the rest with a puzzle, but it did not work out in the end. After doing plenty of parkour and action, doing a puzzle right before the end like playing chess felt like a sudden mood breaker. I had put a lot of thought into making the puzzle, though.

I might need a lot of hard-surface mechanic modeling in the future, so I am spending some time doing it for practice and to set up a pipeline. If I keep practicing, the speed will become faster and the results will improve. Also, since it is an enemy that moves in the air, I am remaking its movement method in a slightly new way. It is because I think there will be occasions to use it in multiple places.

It has been a little over two years since I started development, and I do not think there was any wasted time as a result, but it is a bit regrettable that I spent slightly more time than I originally thought due to overambition. Only now do I realize it, but I did not know it at the time. I should do better next time.

It is the final of the final areas… but I still have not found the direction. It is truly the end, and I want to finish it quickly. For a week, I think I spent quite a lot of time modifying the wall-running mechanics during parkour. It was not gameplay feedback, but while pondering the feedback I received from a gameplay video, I saw a direction that matched the part that had been weighing on my mind, so I tried modifying it.

When reaching a wall through a wall jump, if the next jump was pre-input, it would immediately connect to the next jump, but otherwise, the character would stick to the wall for a moment. In this state, if there was no directional input for a certain amount of time, the character would slowly slide down and fall, and if there was directional input for a certain amount of time, it would start wall-running. The reason I put in this ‘input wait time before wall-running’ was to prevent unwanted wall-running. This was because it was quite disconcerting when I jumped to a wall and wanted to jump to the next wall, but wall-running proceeded due to the directional input I was maintaining. However, due to this wait time, the connectivity of doing consecutive smooth wall-runs or immediately transitioning to a wall-run after a jump was significantly reduced. At the same time, it was also difficult to wall-run at the desired time to avoid obstacles. These points had been weighing on my mind the whole time, and as feedback on the video post I uploaded this time, there were many comments saying that the delay from sticking to the wall until the wall-run was awkward.

Since it was already weighing on my mind, I wondered what to do and ended up putting in a dedicated wall-cling key entirely. On the gamepad, it was the LT button that I intended to use for a special attack, but I judged that if combat is used as a garnish anyway, it is reasonable to allocate an important input to parkour. As always, even if I judge it this way during development, I do not know what kind of complaints will come up once it is actually tested. Even if I have to see about that when the time comes, I thought it was reasonable to move in the direction that I consider right for now, so I proceeded. The controls have become slightly more difficult after acquiring wall-running, but it seems much better in that I can do it as intended, and because of that, I felt the degree of freedom has also increased.

I have completed the second to last section. I have wrapped it up as a first draft for now. I was able to proceed by quickly building and breaking almost all the background placements using the tools I have accumulated over time. Since I have roughly set up the basic gameplay, I will move on to the next stage for now and refine it during polishing.

When I started the current project, I set Brutalism and Mid-Century Modernism as the direction. Brutalism aside, I have been constantly agonizing over how to use Mid-Century Modernism, mainly approaching it through carpet patterns. However, now that I have reached the end, I feel like I have somewhat found the direction, so I am a bit worried about how far back I should take this to do additional work. Of course, I have no intention of extending the development period to apply this; I plan to do it during the polishing period after the alpha test.

To record a slightly deeper story and write a little about the design of the stage called the ‘threshold’: it is a stage designed based on nine letters left behind by a key NPC in the game. This NPC spent about 2 months in real time, which translates to about 160,000 years in the virtual world called the ‘threshold’, building a security system called ‘Lotus one’ alone. (‘Threshold’ is a caching virtual space that runs about 1,000,000 times faster than reality.) I grouped the letters by threes and tried designing it so that their meaning could be seen in the level (probably), and I have now finished the stage for the second group. Actually, there is no strict need to do so, but since I am the type who cannot proceed without a story, theme, or meaning, I ended up starting it that way. Now, only the final stage themed around the final group of letters remains. I do not know how much I will end up completely overhauling during polishing, but looking at how I have fixed the game through feedback so far, I do not think there have been cases where the grand concept or design completely changed.

In the final stages of the threshold, there are no newly acquired abilities. Therefore, the progression mainly consists of solving spatial puzzles with mechanical demands, finding paths within the space, and using different applications of the existing suit programs, rather than the experience of connecting spaces with new abilities. This bothers me a bit, but I will try to modify this as well later while receiving feedback. Since it is the final part, I do not know how much feedback will come, but I will try as much as I can. I keep seeing the end approaching, so it is very exhausting, but I am happy indeed.

Another week has passed as I updated the demo and modified the existing stages. I integrated Game Analytics into the game to check where players drop off the most and am making modifications based on this. This feels somewhat like dissecting myself, making me feel a bit sad, but at the same time, feeling like it is something I absolutely must do. At least in my case, it is. It feels as if a 60% or 70% number is slapped onto a result created by immersing myself in the game world and agonizing over things like, ‘What meaning should it have to place this object in this spot?’, ‘What do I have to do to make them look over there from here?’, and ‘I should probably say something around here in the flow.’ It is like the feeling of a cow I raised with affection turning into a product with its weight in grams and a label attached at a butcher shop. Yet, in my case, a developer cannot make their game if they do not attach affection to it.

Below are the movie posters I put in the theater area of the game. I wanted to include posters that hint at my favorite movies so that users who like movies could see them and try to guess them, but… While wondering if it is right to spend hours agonizing over a single poster used as a prop that might be seen for maybe 0.5 seconds as players pass by… I spent a whopping 4 days making the posters. I wonder if I am doing the right thing. I will just move on by saying that I love movies so much that I allowed myself this kind of romance just for the movie posters. A week has passed while doing other things after only preparing to work on the second stage of the final section. They are things that have to be done at some point anyway, but it feels like when you have to study for an exam, a book you don’t normally read seems interesting. It is a little uncomfortable, but the end is still in sight.

I have finished the first of the three final stages in the threshold. Clearing one of the final three stages opens an important gate one by one, and in the process, reveals important parts of the story little by little. I am making the final stage, but I have absolutely no idea what the difficulty level is like. I have no idea if it is okay to provide no hints at all, if I should provide them, or to what extent I should provide them. I have no idea whether it is difficult or easy either. Since it is the final stage, I am just trying to make it as difficult as possible for now, while trying to follow the rules below as much as possible.

• Minimize state puzzles involving multiple on/off switches. Even if included, use only one switch.
• Avoid jumping matched to timing. (Timing-based play is completely nullified by bulletwalk anyway.)
• Keep physical requirements to a minimum.

I will just build it first and try fixing it during testing. It has been 2 years since I started the current project, and I think I am slowly getting a bit exhausted. Perhaps I am getting tired as I age. I want to finish the remaining two stages and 2 bosses by June and quickly enter alpha testing.

Another week has nearly flown by while I was tweaking the demo build and fixing bugs I had missed. Still, towards the weekend, I was able to resume work on the last stage of the threshold, which I had intended to start a month ago. While reality focuses on Brutalism and Mid-Century Modernism, for the threshold, I am trying to create a vibe inspired by Brutalism combined with 70s abstract art and art galleries. I liked the sunset at the end of the clip—specifically, the way it reflects on the sea—though I am not sure why. While searching for 70s abstract art, I discovered “Dansaekhwa,” a form of Korean monochrome painting from that era. It seemed very similar to the feeling I am trying to achieve. I have no idea how I ended up here. It might be because things I saw before I even became self-aware were imprinted on my mind.

It would be easy for people to say, “Not another box game,” but I am not just mindlessly placing things; I am putting a lot of thought into every detail to create a specific atmosphere. I am not sure if it is worth it though. It is difficult. That is why I was so impressed when I looked at Marathon recently. Their design seems to walk a thin line where it could easily look terrible, but they pull it off perfectly. I think that is an incredibly hard thing to do. Also, as I might have mentioned before, their cinematic short is so good that I have lost count of how many times I have watched it. I never get tired of it.

Perhaps because it is the final stage, or for some other reason, progress is incredibly slow. Aside from the demo build updates, the pace is just not there. It was not like this when I was working on the reality stages. Maybe it is the pressure of having to make the final stage both difficult and ingenious. Anyway, I am not really sure. Meanwhile, time is passing by incredibly fast.