...Dev Log...

08/21/2025

Level Design

Sorry I haven't posted this week, but here's a summary of what I've been up to! Click for details.

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!

08/15/2025

Day 1 of a New Project

So I made my VR template and mapped out a level with a cubegrid, which was something I've never tried before, so that was neat.

As you can probably see, the VR body is looking a little jank, so that's going to need some modifying, but setting up the third person spectator cam worked just fine. It was actually incredibly easy.

I think that'll make it better for streaming gameplay. I want to animate it and have the camera rush up to the player's face while they're reloading and talking or something. Certain items when you use them should change the position of the camera. I son't yet know about the character designs, I really hoped Vroids would look better in UE5. Although it might just be the player body, I don't know yet.

Anyway, it's super fun, so that's good. There are also going to be puzzles which is something I've never actually tried to make before. I also haven't really ever tried to make a level like this before, so I don't know how much "level" to make to have a reasonable amount of content.

It does feel like a very solid start though, I might have gone overboard in the AI trees though, the enemies have a tendency to hound you into a corner.

08/15/2025

What I've got so far

Luckily I already have a pretty good starting point.

When I first got inot game design it was because I was going through a really big VR kick after the pandemic. I was frustrated that there wasn’t a whole lot of games, and AI had just been invented and all the memes were basically saying that coders were using it to do all their work for them.

So long story short, I had the great idea back then to get a bunch of assets and use AI to write code that would link them all together in Unity and make my own VR games, or at the very least VRChat worlds.

That didn’t even almost happen.

Unity had a change in their pricing model that punished people trying to make games for free, so I switched over to Unreal Engine, saw that their coding wasn’t text based, and realized AI would be a no help here. I still downloaded a fuck ton of assets, thinking game design could be just a little harder than making a mission in Spore.

It was a pretty humbling experience to find out that this was definitely not the case, but it was also really fun so I kept at it. I didn’t make anything remotely usable, mostly spaghetti code that tried to make a number of assets work together that were all fighting each other and destroying the frame rate. Every singe VR tutorial and asset pack overrides the grab function for some reason, so I’d hit the grip on my controller and smoke would start coming out of the fans on my PC.

I had wanted to make a VR template that would be usable for a number of games, and I eventually came up with one that used about 6 major asset packs (I was broke from constantly buying these) and it played like ass and froze anytime you put it in a level bigger than a port-a-potty stall. Eventually I was forced to give up on the VR thing, and switched to 3^rd person. In a few months after buying another 600 dollars worth of asset packs, I had the startling realization that if I ditched the expensive templates and coded the features myself, they’d work well together, and I also realized I actually knew what I was doing with the Unreal Engine code. After a year and a half, I realized I understood how all this shit worked.

So that was me working on The Last Starchild, a super ambitious open world game that I wanted to get lost in, and I’ve been doing that all year, until I recently realized that I don’t actually have forever to dedicate to this one project, and now in a panic I’m trying to reach for something a bit smaller in scope. More Resident Evil than Fallout New Vegas.

I decided that I do want to put it in VR, the market there is still so small that I might have a half decent chance of someone buying it. I opened up that VR template, immediately saw all the places that it was falling apart, and whipped up a new one in less than a day that did everything I had wanted the old one to do without falling to pieces. That’s where I am now.

There’s probably going to be a few more hiccups that I need to deal with, but it’s actually been going so smoothly that I spent yesterday working on lore and story beats, and today I feel pretty comfortable making blockouts of the levels. So yeah, it still uses some asset packs, but I’m not trying to Frankenstein together major gameplay features.

I’m an indie dev, so my main focus is going to be the story, first and foremost. That being said, I do still want it to be fun. So I guess we’ll see how that goes.