Category: 미분류

Filled in the Attune text and hooked it up to events. For the additional text I’ll need later, I just dropped in placeholders so I can batch-write them all at once. Attune is a feature for reading the signals left behind in the world — mostly background lore and a few gameplay hints. Most of it takes the form of logs left by AI, and the rest are proper sentences, but everything has to fit in a small on-screen space, so the length constraint was severe. It’s a bit under 100 lines total, and it took me about three days. Way longer than I expected, and it was exhausting. The overall flow of events was settled long ago, but each Attune entry has a different point in time and a different perspective within those events, all of which have to stay consistent — and even though the sentences are dry and rigid, they need to carry emotion, all within about 30 words. It took a lot of thinking and reworking.

While writing, I found that markers of time hit the hardest, at least for me. Things like “Aquarium drained. 73 years 4 months since.” or “Last backup: 100 years 3 months 7 days ago.” That’s purely my own feeling — it may land differently for others, or not at all. Attune actually requires a separate Suit Program you pick up mid-game, and that program isn’t even on the mandatory main route. Even so, I think it plays the most important role in delivering the game’s mood and background, so I poured an enormous amount of time and care into it. I don’t know who will ever read it, but I’m satisfied with it on my own.

After Attune comes the chat log. The chat window was originally built in the early days to avoid using voice acting, and after drifting around from place to place it has settled in as a secondary feature. It’s also completely optional text — you can progress without reading any of it — and it mostly carries background story that isn’t directly tied to gameplay. Why “not directly tied”? Because I can’t know whether a player will read a chat right after obtaining it or only after clearing the game. So most chat content is about things that happened in the past, or conversations about things that are always there.

Dialogue hookup is about a third done, I think. For now I’m just filling slots with placeholder text and leaving notes about what should go where. Two and a half years — I really have been making this for a long time. Next time I want to build much, much faster.

Finally connected from start to finish. Cutscenes and dialogue are still left, but it’s playable end to end. It’s been long and hard, and the final stretch especially has been rough since I’m running on empty. Still, writing dialogue should be the enjoyable part, so I’m looking forward to it. Two and a half years of development is coming to an end.

The rough playtime ratio and order goes something like reality 1 — threshold 0.01 — reality 0.5 — threshold 0.5 — reality 0.1. (The demo covers about 0.4 of that first reality 1.) Right now I’m hooking up the quests for that final threshold 0.5 — reality 0.1 stretch. Quest hookup means handling events and quest processing when previously built sections get cleared. The quest side is just table entry, but the events take some work. I’m planning to finish the connections first, then handle the event work while rewriting the dialogue. Events need some animation assembly too, so there’s a bit of labor involved.

Finishing around late September and moving into testing and voice recording still looks doable, but I’ll need to build more to know for sure. Being at the tail end is pretty draining, and I’ve been getting through it by thinking about the next project, or imagining refactoring and tearing this one apart to build a sequel, or remaking the prologue.

Anyway, it’s more than just “the end is in sight” — it’s closer to the summit. Close enough that I can see the ridgeline connecting my position to the peak.

Also, GTA 6 is something else. It’s been a long time since a game made my heart race like that. I’d pushed my release to February even though I’ll be done in October or November, because of the advice that GTA would vacuum up all media attention for two months around its launch — and now I’m certain that was the right call.

Finished the first pass on threshold gameplay polish and now working on the real-world stages. While polishing, there are quite a few things where I wonder why I’m only noticing and fixing them now. Then again, what feels right to me now might not land with players at all — I probably won’t know until testing.

Beyond that, the code and blueprints have piled up over so long that I keep getting the urge to rebuild the things I made before I knew what I was doing. But finishing is the top priority right now, so I’m sticking to “don’t touch what’s working” and wrapping things up carefully. The itch is killing me.

I went to grab a fresh screenshot for the first time in a while and happened to compare it against an old one — it’s changed quite a bit. Hope it’s for the better. I’m running on nothing but the belief that for an indie game, finishing is the best marketing, but it isn’t easy. The checklist is shrinking faster than I expected. Which also means I’m getting more nervous.

I’m assembling the threshold gameplay. Placing and tuning enemies I built a while back and only tested briefly — that side turned out to be less rotten than expected. I’m also updating the demo, and while testing the existing environment updates a fair number of issues surfaced. Spent a full day fixing those.

Every now and then I get a comment that, by my judgment, seems low priority. I’m not talking about trolling — I mean comments where, taken at face value, there seems to be nothing to act on. For example, someone commented on the video I posted today that the cables would eat a lot of video memory and I should reconsider decorating that way. The cable mesh uses a single material, so it’s one section, and by vertex count the memory footprint is roughly equivalent to a single 4096 texture. In short, memory isn’t really an issue. And my machine is a 2060 6GB, which isn’t great by current standards — it’s lower-mid tier even as a play environment, let alone a dev environment. Even so, it runs perfectly fine in the editor. When video memory runs short, you can’t get any work done at all.

So on the surface it looked like an unfounded concern, and I almost let it go — but just in case, I went back and looked at those cables again. What the user actually meant wasn’t video memory specifically, but a worry about things slowing down, and instead of just concluding “memory’s fine,” I should have checked once more for anything that could cause a performance hit. So I did, and thanks to that user I found something. Those cables sit flush against the floor, so there’s no need for them to cast real-time shadows. And since the cable bundles are large and heavily self-overlapping, generating that much complex shadow in real time could have been a real cost. Thanks to that comment I was able to fix it. It was already running fine so turning off shadows didn’t produce a dramatic performance jump, but there’s no reason to burn performance on something that isn’t needed.

So now I find myself giving even the strangest comments a second thought. There are people who just show up to pick fights — usually people with no interest in the game, who haven’t played it and have no intention to — and I’m not sure their words warrant a second pass. But most comments, especially the ones that seem unnecessary or come across as rude or unpleasant, seem worth digging into and thinking through once more. I think I wrote something similar during the last project — it feels like finding gold in mud.

Environment work is wrapped up for now. On the threshold side, there’s more stuff I deferred to future-me than actual environment polish left. A lot of it has rotted from changes I made after building the threshold. There are so many games I want to make, but each one takes so long. I really want to cut that down further.

Now it’s assembling everything that’s scattered around, polishing, and rewriting the dialogue — at least a month and a half. Then voice recording and testing. The usual problem is that plans keep slipping bit by bit, but the gap has been converging at least.

Still working on environments. Maybe halfway through, or a little past halfway. The pace has picked up a bit compared to before, but it’s exhausting. Not being able to hike or even take walks because it’s so hot outside is probably a big part of it. As completion gets closer, I get a bit scared and unhelpful thoughts keep surfacing, though I’ve gotten better at not indulging them compared to before. Back when I was in QA getting hammered with criticism and completely disoriented, maybe being too busy to think was actually easier. Still, the environments do seem to be slowly getting better, which feels good.

I’m placing as little as possible by hand — most of it goes through tools I’ve written. Laying down masses of cables on the floor, covering walls with computers, generating rooms, corridors, stairs — all done programmatically. Baseboards, door frames, repeating objects and columns, mesh walls are handled by tools too, though at this point I’m nervous about digging any deeper, so a lot of it ends up semi-automated. It bothers me that some decals are still being placed by hand, but this late in the project I’m hesitant to touch certain things. If I get to make another 3D metroidvania, I’d want to automate much more of this — make space design faster and easier so I can focus purely on the logical design.

I’ve been setting rules for environment decals and rough lighting guidelines, then working through them. Placing things according to the rules leaves my head free, which means stray thoughts keep surfacing — not great. Looks like I’ll be doing nothing but environment polish for about another month and a half.

However I look at it, the world is full of malice and curses, like a manchineel forest, and I’ve come to think that finding meaning within that and giving what I can is the purpose of life. Meaning has always been abundant for me — making games, family. But giving is something that never even crossed my mind until now.

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.