Category: 미분류

The ambient audio and music pass is done, the text pass is done, and I’ve worked through most of the smaller fix list. All the existing music went into the threshold, but every track had to be re-arranged into a softer version. Apart from achievements and the end content that unlocks after clearing the game, everything is genuinely finished. The credit roll is filled in too, except for the voice actors. I’ll update it as players who help out during testing get added.

A little over two and a half years. It feels strange. None of the numbers or circumstances are good, but the game is finished, and after some twenty years I’ve made something I’m happy with. That feeling will probably get dismantled during testing, but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

Next I’ll test it myself on a dev build, pull together another round of fixes, and work through those along with the end content. Probably about a week to get there. Handling achievements means I’ll need to register a build on Steam somewhere in the middle. After that I should be able to start testing and put out a call for voice actors before the end of October.

I’ve been organizing the ambient audio and music while refining and fixing events along the way. The reality side stays dry, mostly environmental sound, with music coming in only occasionally. The threshold side runs music throughout. Taking things that only existed as isolated features, consolidating them and building atmosphere out of them — the results come back in proportion to the time I put in, so it’s rewarding and genuinely fun. My stamina is the problem. Right now all I can think about is hoping players like it.

Building bosses and polishing marketplace animations into events seem like similar work, but events are much less stressful, maybe because the outcome is fixed. In some ways I think they’re more fun too.

The surface-level story stays simple enough not to get in the way of exploration, but for players who read the text through Attune and pick up the chat logs, the much larger story underneath should come through. There are probably more players who just want to enjoy the exploration. Players generally seem to lose patience once dialogue runs past two lines, so I’m cutting down heavily on voiced lines that have to be skipped.

I keep saying it’s almost done and more work keeps appearing, bit by bit. Still, it’s converging on the goal rather than diverging, so I think it’ll be finished within the month. Then testing and voice recording.

Separate from finishing the game, I’m just grateful to my wife, who supports this whole adventure completely.

Finished the ending and the credit roll, and wrapped up the trailer for a game show submission. I’m not releasing the trailer separately — just put it up on Steam. It’s in this post too. I made it while being pulled between two thoughts: that nothing happens if you do nothing, and that making it won’t move anything anyway. So it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable process. No new footage went in; I just built the context out of what was already there.

Making games is about two billion times more fun than making trailers. Thinking about the next game is another five billion times more fun than that.

While pulling a shipping build to capture B-roll for the trailer, I kept spotting things that need fixing. I’ll deal with them while working on the dialogue. And the music all needs another pass too. Is the work actually shrinking, though…

Phew. The boss entrance scene is nearly wrapped. A couple more fixes and I move on to the ending. I went back and forth a lot on whether to destroy that palace, since I figured it would eat a lot of time, but somehow it came together in three days. Keeping the palace meant it had to break for the boss to appear, but giving it up meant losing that feeling entirely. I had to dig out tools I couldn’t even remember the last time I used, which was daunting, but they held up well and it went fine.

That palace (Injeongjeon) was bought during the last project, and its texture sizes were a mess — it was eating video memory at a terrifying rate. Because of that, things kept slowing down mid-scene and I went looking for the cause everywhere else first, which meant I ended up doing every other optimization before finally fixing the texture sizes. Now it runs okay. The video is from a standalone build; a shipping build should be smoother.

So now it’s really the ending. For the ending I’m planning to move the levels I’ll use as backdrops into new levels, set up static poses with a bit of camera movement, capture that, and handle it as video. The music will be carrying a lot of weight here. I bought a model for the ending but couldn’t find one at decent quality. It only appears in two ending shots in a fixed pose, so I can’t bring myself to install new tools and dig through it. The model quality is rough, but I’ll try to cover for it with camera work.

As I get closer to finishing, the things I want to improve and apply next time are stirring hard. Right now game progression is handled by an in-house script closer to assembly, with no arithmetic or logic in it at all — the one exception is a basic if-then. I decided that once a game script starts carrying logic, debugging becomes unmanageable later, so the script should do nothing beyond running things sequentially and making it easy to wait on something mid-sequence. That’s how it’s built.

Next time I want to stack a BASIC on top of that assembly (I’ve loosely named it a-asm, short for aom asm; the BASIC would be a-basic). Instead of wiring commands by hand across the code like I do now, I’d add an action, have the action describe itself, and let that propagate all the way up to the BASIC layer. I’m thinking of handling the a-basic to a-asm translation in VS Code. The a-basic layer would of course keep logic at the same if-then level. Two reasons for this: easier editing and readability, and because I want to make a game in the BASIC I used as a kid. The second one I consider an excellent reason.

Beyond that, I want to fix all the mistakes I made back when my understanding of the engine was weaker. I spent 2.5 years on this project, and if I improve the things I have in mind, I wonder whether the same scope could come down to a year and a half. I went down so many wrong paths on this one.

Circumstances aren’t easy, but things like this get my heart racing, and sometimes I wonder what that says about me. It’s also what makes me feel that building things the way I do now makes me happy.

One ending event left, then writing out the dialogue. And the end content.

Last week I was worn out and found myself wanting to see the ocean — and then something surprising happened. A close relative took my wife and me to Jeju, covering everything, flights and lodging included. A completely unexpected four-day trip. It almost feels like I dreamed it. We ate and slept in wonderful places. At one museum, an old magazine on display reminded me of something I’d sent in as a kid, so I got to check on that, and I was able to visit a few art museums and notable buildings. I also had the chance to see the work of a famous painter who has since passed. I remember seeing him on the news when I was a kid and wondering why his work was so popular — and even now, older, I still couldn’t quite see it. His very early work, though, I did like. Apparently he too moved from country to country chasing opportunity, struggled enormously for a long time, and then a chance introduction by a journalist made him famous. For a moment I thought, maybe it was all a bit similar even 50 years ago.

Working through the final assembly, I’ve had the feeling — for the first time in decades — of something I’d imagined and wanted actually clicking together like a puzzle. Along the way I stripped things out and cut things back; early on I’d stuffed in explanations, almost as if to convince myself about what was underbuilt or lacking, and then removed all of it. But lining it all up at the end, the thought that came was: it’s been a very long time since I felt this. Whether many people will play it or like it is a separate question, but getting something I’m satisfied with — that really has been a long time. I want to finish this and start on the next one. Just thinking about building it makes my heart race.

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.