potatoptarmigans gamedev blog

 Got all the portraits done. I'm about 85% happy with them. They're not quite at the level I'd like them to be but that comes with more practice and time. I can always replace them later, but I'd rather have something halfway decent instead of the uncolored sketches in a square I had before. Got a whole bunch of prototype assets replaced. I'm still doing some more stuff to add grunge to the walls. Will go back to the tunnel boss soon, but I think I'll push up an update with all this new polished stuff after testing.

 I've gotten multiple features needed for the boss fight working. Made a turret with a locked angle constraint, polished how the hit effects work (they'll spawn on the model in the y location that you hit them in while rotated at the correct angle) instead of just a static location/rotation attached to the spine bone. Also, the platform moves properly. I'm still working on character portraits and adjusting all the lighting in the locations. This time around I'd also like to bake the lighting for optimization. I'm also working on some tooling to further streamline the Blender to Godot pipeline.

  Adding a bit more to the background. Also adding grunge and stuff to floors and walls. Starting the coding process for the first boss fight, but going to leave that a gray box prototype for now to make sure the models are the right size. I plan to move the healthbar to be over Lea's head just like Sera's and make it a diff color with a slightly different design. I think that'll be less confusing and fit into the minimalist ui design. The framerate here is the game running at 1920x1080 on a Ryzen 5500u laptop processor no scaling. When scaled at 0.7 it's about 35 fps which is somewhat acceptable, but I'm definitely looking into baking the lighting at one point. Would love to hit 60fps at 1920x1080 on this low spec laptop, but that might not be reasonable. 

 I am experimenting with IK since I'm going to need it for the boss fight. Also still working on the character portraits. Most bugs have been fixed, and I'm working on getting some new particle effects in because the old ones are bad and unfitting. I'm also considering changing Sera's design a little, I really liked her practice round outfit, but I guess that'll just be a future thing to consider. I'd also like to change the cutscenes into an animated comic esque thing or 3d animated.

 I'm working on coloring in some of the subway assets. As a relaxation exercise from the exam failure, I messed around with the lighting in ALAWT. I found a lot of the places were quite bland, which I don't think has to be true for a horror game, so I adjusted the saturation and contrast in the lighting. Since this is Lea's office which is a relatively safe spot, I let it stay a warmer orange color. I ramped up the fog a bit so there's actually hidden corners. I was mainly looking at screenshots of Labrys and older screenshots of Practice Round and realized there were some really nice colorful screens there that I just kind of ... dropped in ALAWT, probably due to the horror aspect. I was thinking of desaturating it, but I think I took it a step too far. I still stayed away from stuff like volumetric fog and sdfgi. I'm still trying to aim for a game that can run on a sub 300 budget laptop...provided you're using AMD of course. I put the old one at the bottom to ...

 I'm working on fixing up a bunch of bugs in ALAWT and I've been working on the colored portraits. I'm actually managing to get it looking decent so I can post it soon. I've also been working on the blood particle effect so that should get in soon. Edit: Failed the exam by just one step so I guess ALAWT development is still going to be slow. I have to wait a month before I can take it again and I have to study more.