Category: 미분류

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.

Working on the new boss. I’m building it with multi-legged locomotion so the player can climb its legs using wall jumps. The body is driven by skeletal animation while the legs are handled with procedural animation. I’ve done procedural movement plenty of times before, but I keep getting greedy with it and ending up rolling back. When you’re solving things programmatically, you unconsciously start avoiding skeletal animation, and I think that’s the number one way I overcomplicate things.

The two most common types of messages I get while making this game are marketing offers and music composition offers. Marketing offers — I can almost tell it’s a marketing DM just from how it opens. The pattern is always the same: no introduction, just a casual greeting with no mention of what they actually want. Composition offers come with a portfolio, but with zero consideration for the direction of the music already in the game, and I’ve never once found anything relevant in those portfolios. Some even push with “do you know who I am.” You don’t even know who you are — how am I supposed to?

Anyway, promoting a game is incredibly hard for me too. I try different things, introduce the game here and there, but sometimes I wonder — is my outreach any different from theirs? Am I reaching out to the wrong places? But then I’ve tried everywhere I can think of, so where else is there? A lot of thoughts like that. It actually gets harder a year after the demo launch, not easier. “Launching is the best marketing” feels more real by the day. But you still need some visibility before launch so people even know it exists. In the end, all these thoughts and attempts always loop back to the same place: just finish it. Focus on making it.

Boss work is taking longer than expected. Dental treatments keep eating into my schedule, wiping out a day here and there. The gameplay design for the boss is mostly done — I just want to build it out quickly, but that’s easier said than done. Can’t wait to get this done.

Finally done. This one took a long time too — not as long as the previous boss, but still. The video work I had to fit in along the way probably made it longer. It’s been the hardest stretch of this project so far. Not because the work itself was hard, but because juggling everything in parallel was stressful. Anyway, it’s done. I’ll handle tuning later during testing.

Life kind of feels like a long fight with things you can’t control. I’ve been the type who beats myself up trying to do something about what I can’t. I’ve also seen people who, when they can’t control somebody, find a way to grind them down or shove them into themselves, or just label them as an enemy. Looking back, I came to understand it as fear — fear of the things you can’t do anything about.

Tangent aside, the numbers are something I can’t really control either. They refuse to budge no matter how hard I push, then suddenly jump when I’m doing nothing. The good thing is that I’ve gotten better at letting go of what I can’t control, so it naturally flows into “just focus on finishing the work.” Next up is a boss called T6. Last boss of the game — wonder how rough it’ll be, or maybe now that I’m not glued to the numbers, I can wrap it up quickly.

Boss hit reactions, boss attacks, and player hit reactions are mostly done. Just the death sequence and phase transitions left. The end is finally in sight — this one was rough. Since even the movement is built as patterns, instead of a behaviour tree I just need to decide what state comes next at the end of each one. Assembly should take a day or two, tuning maybe 3–4 more days.

I also fixed two bugs that had been sitting around for almost two years. Both turned out to be Unreal bugs. First one: a scene component attached to a movable character would occasionally behave as if it were static. It only happened sometimes and I couldn’t reliably reproduce it, so I never managed to track down the cause — until I caught it while building the new boss camera. Attaching a fresh scene component fixed it. What’s strange is that if you attach a static mesh component to a static mesh actor in the background, the component gets added as movable, but if you attach a component to a movable actor like a character, it sometimes attaches as static. Second bug: in shipping builds only, Niagara beams were getting culled. I’d only seen one report and couldn’t reproduce it — until today, when it suddenly showed up in my own shipping build. I tried everything but couldn’t fix it. People online say beams aren’t reliable, so I replaced them with spline meshes. Still need to test, but it feels great to clear two bugs that old.

The first boss took 2 months. This second one has taken 5 weeks so far including modeling, and maybe ¼ to ⅓ of that time went to trailer and PR work. So roughly a month of actual boss work, with 3–4 days left. Bosses feel like tangled bundles of video clips — not the most fun thing to build — but the build time is going down, which is something. I want to finish the last boss in May and wrap the build in June. I’ve picked up a lot of know-how on this one, so for the next game I’d like to try something simpler that I can finish in 1 to 1.5 years.

Submitting to a game show taught me a lot. I’d been pretty naive about it. Turns out game shows are closer to an advertising market than a place that gives indies a leg up. Submission costs are steep and the math doesn’t really work for a game my size, so I ended up dropping it. I just released the trailer on its own. Feedback’s been mixed — it’s a tone I hadn’t tried before. I’ll do better next time.

Anyway, the end is getting closer and that feels good. Whether it ends well or not, finishing something is its own reward.

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.