...Dev Log...

Hi all!

Sorry it’s been like a month almost, I’ve been really struggling with save states and VR and everything, and things in my life have been happening fast.

I moved everything to a template project so that it’s easier to polish, and so that I can clone the project and mess around with any features I want to add before I decide to put them in the template, and so that when I get too lost in it I can scrap the whole idea and start a new project from the template and not lose progress. I think it’s actually been super helpful!

But anyway, the thing I’ve been working on right now is this: when the player transitions to a new level, how can they bring the things that they had in their previous level with them? The slots all spawn empty when I try to just load up a new level. So I messed around with that for a few weeks, and it’s a super frustrating topic. I had to make the slots send their stored items to the instance, and then I had to have the instance save and load everything in the slots, and then the real kicker was how to have each one of those slots know what of the list of things stored in the instance were theirs. That was the part that made things difficult.

Basically, I ended up giving each slot it’s own unique identifier, though I can’t find a way to make this automatic, and then the slot looks through the array for it’s identifier to fill itself on load (hehe). This is a pain in the ass but it works, and after like 3 projects that didn’t work I was happy to have anything that did.

Then I made a backpack setup that spawns a new bag and loads itself with the things in it’s slots when you load up the game, so now there’s that, which is super nice. It means you can put on a backpack, the game will remember which backpack you grabbed, and when you travel to a new level the backpack will come with you along with everything in it. That’s exactly what I wanted, but the problem now is that if you put a gun in the backpack, it doesn’t stay loaded. So I think I’m going to need to have the weapons save their configurations on something, especially if I want to do something like an attachment system.

The other stuff that I worked on was the camera.

Now when you reload guns the camera switches to look at you as you do it. Same thing with grabbing the backpack. I like the camera that points at the player more than the over-the-shoulder thing that I had before, but it does mean that the spectators probably won’t be able to see what all is in the backpack. There’s an angle you can hold it at so that you can see it, but I don’t think you’re often going to get that view. Still, when healing or reloading, I think it’ll be better to actually see the player character. It certainly feels cooler.

I also learned about timer and how they work, which is a game changer, because it means all the shit I had on the tick event, which was slowing down all that processing power, is now working on timers. So that’s a lot more optimized, which, as I learned in the level designing process, is incredibly important in a VR game.

So, there has been progress going on! I didn’t mean to go so long without an update. Sorry about that. My boss did end up getting his promotion, so I kind of panicked about my work from home situation, and my roommate moved out and I’ve been emotionally adjusting to living alone again and my best friend is getting more serious with her new partner, so she’s been just naturally showing up less in my life. Things be changing.

Also Dropbox stopped all my links from working so I’m gonna port everything to the YouTube channel and update the pages. Probably today.

The good news is that I was able to add chest pockets, and I think they really streamline the inventory management, though they do still need some tweaks.

The bad news is that the enemies still wont react when they're on streaming levels (except those ones in the annex??? Like why?) and sometimes the grab component just flat out refuses to grab. I need to fix that thing. But today I mainly worked on the chest pocket actor, so you can grab a spot on your chest like you're opening your jacket and a few inventory slots spawn in the air. That way you aren't just totally reliant on whatever you can hold in your hands until you come across your first backpack, and when you get a backpack you won't be looking for a table every time you want to use it.

I also fixed the rifle class, so now if it's got a round chambered you don't have to re-rack the weapon, although the pistol seems to need a few rackings now, and I'm not sure how those could have affected each other. Things to consider for tomorrow I suppose.

Yes, the chest pockets currently manifest as a giant mug in her face, I needed something to attach a grab component to so she could grab onto it to toggle her pockets open lolol I'll hide that in the gameplay, I really only need a handle. I

t's a lot more fun now though with the combat being streamlined. It's definitely going to be a resource-management game, I can already see how important your amount of inventory slots is going to be. I'll keep y'all posted :3

Today I worked on the monsters a bit, after I got the guns fixed. Something to shoot and something to shoot them with :3

I know I already had guns and monsters, but I tweaked them a little so that the monsters are kinda scary to fight, and the actually react to being in combat. Also with the guns I needed to adjust them so that I could make more and different types.

Thanks for GDXR for giving me a good shooting rage!

I have been working on optimization, which is the most boring-to-show part of game development.

Basically, the framerate is still my main focus, and I’ve learned a lot of optimization techniques in the past week (and some change). I’ve also made an updated model for my protagonist, I was going to have her hair bounce, but then that dropped my frames to the single digits, so I tried again with less hair-bones, and still couldn’t get it to hold steady. I think optimizing the lighting and individual rooms is going to be the way to go, that seems to be what’s making the most progress. Level design is hard!

One thing I am happy about though, is that all the stuff I just learned is exactly what I needed to know to get past the point I got stuck at with The Last Starchild, so when I pick that back up it’s going to be a lot better. Making a 3^rd person shooter is actually a hundred times easier than making a VR game, but making a VR game will teach you how to get so technical and zero in on all the parts of game design that are less for the beginners and more for the beginner-to-advanceders. I’ve got the framerate holding at above 30fps right now, without having to compromise on too many of my features (I will revisit the hair bounce, eventually lol) which I know is still pretty rough but it was like 15 at this point last week.

Still trucking on and working on things!

Sorry I haven’t been posting for a while, I’ve been getting single-digit framerates in VR mode. I had to look up a number of things, but the main thing that I found is that post-processing is actually very heavy on computation power, and I cel shaded my whole game in an effort to make the assets match the vroid characters. Also, I had all my lights set to the most detailed they could be because I couldn’t get the shadows to work correctly on any other setting. Both of these things really didn’t do any favors for my computer performance, and so things kinda started falling apart.

So I went back and studied up on UV layers and lightmapping, so I could switch the lighting to Static, which is the easiest mode for a computer to render, and quickly found out that because of the way I had made the building in Blender, the modifiers had made sure that the UV maps would never function while they drew breath. So I had to basically remake the entire building, and this time the only modifier I used was the Boolean modifier to cut doorways out of the walls. I had been pretty liberal with the solidify modifier in the original draft, and that was what screwed me. So that took a bit of time, then the static lights still weren’t working, so I started looking into shadow resolutions. There’s a lot in lighting, as it turns out, and I know I’ve barely scratched the surface, so I’m going to keep it simple and stick to the things IN know will work, even if it’s more laborious and takes a little more effort.

So, now the building is realistically lit, there’s no cartooniness in the walls and furniture and in some places its like pitch black dark. I added a flashlight, which should be a very fun mechanic, but this does make me truly realize and appreciate that this is a horror game that I’m making, and the lighting in the building now supports that. The character on the screen (tessa) isn’t going to be in the actual game so she’s still cel shaded, but the main protagonist, Rebecca, is back to normal colors. Next I’m going to look into Lighting Scenarios, I don’t really know what that is, but I heard about them in passing and I think that might be exactly what I need.

I knew this level was going to be the “figure out what works” level, so I;m not too torn up that it’s taking so long. Once I figure out the workflow and the systems I need to be using, I think the other ones should go a bit faster. This is still Baby’s First VR Level after all.

I’ve been on new meds so things have been a little wonky lately. Here’s what I got though, it’s still very much a work in progress, and there’s a shitton to do. Those grab components that came with the GDXR asset pack are utter dogshit and have literally been a thorn in my side for like three years now e.e I’ll need to either rework them with my own code, like I did with the handguns, or completely discard them and build my own from scratch, like I did with the item storage.

Also, sorry about the backpack, I had no idea it did that to the camera, but it’s colliders are set to ignore cameras, so I’ll have to do a lot of digging to find out why it still isn’t. The same goes for the character model being able to just phase through cover, I don’t really know what that’s about. I’ve got the cover meshes set to block everything and the character meshes set to block everything, so I really have no idea what’s going on there. More digging to be dug.

I’m pretty proud of the AI trees though right now. I’ve spent like two days making those soldiers hard to kill in VR, though I realized in the cafeteria battle that the guns don’t make any noise, which is why that one guy was just jorking it in the corner until I threw a lamp at him. I was trying to show the monsters being creepy, instead of just beelining straight at me, but only one of them strafed. Having the monsters fight the soldiers has been pretty entertaining today.

All this to say, I am still working on it, and I am making progress. That backpack was doing basically everything I wanted it to except for the camera thing, so that was good. The gun chests have little gun icons over them, and they swing open pretty satisfyingly when you flick the switch on them. The rifles still need a lot of work.

But things are moving along :3

Lately I’ve ben trying to work on optimization, which isn’t really something I’ve ever gotten to in the previous projects. ON the one hand that’s a good thing because it means I’ve gotten further than I ever have, but on the other, it’s also the part I keep hearing is the most boring and intensive, and it’s apparently where most people fall off of game making as a hobby. It’s boring enough that it doesn’t really have a lot of YouTube videos. I haven’t found it nearly as tedious as people made it sound like it was going to be though, so that’s good at least.

I told my dad I’d send him a video on my progress, so that’s what I’ve got linked here. I’m honestly a little self-conscious about putting these on YouTube now, I don’t know why. I think without the context of this devlog they feel a lot more amateurish.

Well, anyway, work is going well, and I’ll continue to make updates as things progress!

Today I didn’t do a whole lot, but I did manage to create swinging doors that move when you push on them. The GDXR asset I’ve been using already comes with doors that have handles and everything, but they kind of suck, because one thing you never really realize about a door is that when you open it you really throw your whole weight against the thing. That becomes a problem when the door isn’t actually there, so I know it’s less immersive, but I think it’ll let the player focus more on the gameplay if the door just opens itself when they press against the bar.

I think one thing I’ve really started realizing in the process of trying to make a video game is that you can get really hung up on trying to make things work like they do in the real world, but a computer can’t always handle that, and you can’t synthesize everything. There’s no door there for you to throw yourself against, and if this horror game starts to propperly horror, that’s going to be a problem. There would be nothing more frustrating than running down a hallway and trying to use one of the GDXR finnicky doors.

In other news, I fixed the lights so that they don’t run the computer ragged and show different shadows in different eyes, and found a material that has a dirt mask that takes the focus off the repeating tile materials on the wall. My level is starting to feel a lot more like a level and I’m pretty happy about that.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Sorry I've been kind of MIA lately, I've been trying to work on level design stuff, and things in my life have been catching fire right and left. A friend got fleas in their house because of their terrible neighbors and now I'm more or less trying to help deal with that. Also I ran out of storage in Dropbox so I'm trying to find other ways of hosting all these dev videos, I'll probably get a YouTube account, that seems like the wasiest answer.

So I've been working on character and level design, and I tried to put the sidekick character in a level where you actually meet her and realized that if the textures are too realistic, anime girls are kind of nightmare fuel. This is meant to be a horror game, but not that part of it hahah. So I moved back to the original toon shaders that vroids come with, but then it dind't match any of my textures, so I spent today making and tweaking a cel-shader that hopefully won't take too much from the horror vibes I;m trying to go with. I've never seen a horror anime that actually scared me, so I'm a little worried about that.

I'll post a video when I have the account up of what I've got so far!

Sorry it's been such a while since I posted anything, the depression has been winning.

Still though, I've been making progeress. I watched a video on level design and decided to completely rework the map I was showing in the last video, now you can't even tell it's the same layout. I'll link the vid below, it was super good and made a world of difference!

The things I've been working on lately have been puzzles rooms, inventory slots, and little fixes here and there. Last time I worked on VR games I couldn't figure out a good symstem for inventory slots, and it kind of ended up being a pretty big contributor for why I stopped. This morning though I made my own inventory slots and I think they work pretty well!

The next thing I worked on, which I don't think I even listed in the video below was the puzzle mechanics. I've got the room that you have to climb to get into, and I think that's a pretty good start, but there's also a room that fills up with gas and you have to find the crank and shut it off before the time runs out. I like that one a lot, it was pretty hard.

The main thing I worked on today was the inventory backpack mechanic. I took 3 takes of teh video below, so the last one I forgot to use the backpack aside from grabbing it. It automatically goes back to your back, so that's handy, and it has 4 inventory slots that hide when it's back there so that it's more immersive for spectators. I don't quite have all teh kinks ironed out, and I want to give it way more functionality, like having the chase camera pull in when you take it off your back and having different pockets that appear and disapear as you put your hand over them. All kinds of things, just to make it a little bit more fun and immersive.

There's still a long way to go, as you see in the video the inventory slots still don't work all the time perfectly, and that point where all the enemies just stopped attacking me at the end is where I died, there's not really a system in place for that yet, but things are coming along pretty nicely! I hope to have more updates for you guys soon!