potatoptarmigans gamedev blog

 The past few weeks were basically visual asset weeks. Most of the assets in the boss fight are complete. I'm still missing sfx, some bug fixes and an intro sequence. First screenshot is how things look inside godot with all the other screenshots taken inside blender. I swapped to a flat platform instead of my original idea which was to tear open a subway car but that proved to be complicated with issues involving collision, how the latching enemies will interact, etc, so I tossed that idea for a "maintenance" platform. The intro sequence will make use of the car though and it's another asset I get to toss in for variation, so no loss there. I also have one more planned obstacle for players that won't be too much to add in, I just haven't done it yet. how things look now.

 I've mainly been ironing out weird bugs on the boss fight. However, I feel a bit stuck on it, so I'm going to start working on level 2 since I already have a bunch of ideas for that including the overall design and a puzzle.

 I spent a little too long working on a shader for the hurtbox of the villi. But I'm going to put that aside for now and try to work on other stuff. I'm modifying the subway assets a bit because I want the player to beable to see through walls whichever angle they choose. I created a set of animations for the villi, so it's got all the attack/flinch, etc animations because the previous one was on a very prototype model. There's still some weirdness in the IK animation and I have to fix that.

 I have been working on the model for the new enemy. I also ran into a new issue. Some friends tried playtesting ALAWT on their old mac laptops. It crashed a whole bunch of times, so I am working on a compatibility version using the OpenGL renderer. Luckily, I think it's mainly just a few lighting tweaks and I ended up removing shadows on it. I figured if someone's laptop doesn't even support Vulkan, it'll probably struggle with shadows.  I'm going to update with a compatibility version/low end version soon. I noticed just removing shadows made it run at nearly 60fps on my budget laptop full screen, so it should be good for lower end devices as well, though I will eventually make that an option in the Vulkan version as well. It's also really hard to notice the missing shadows simply because the maps are already filled with fog and darkness. It's moving along I would say this monster is based off The Thing, which is one of my favorite movies. I felt like I ha...

 Added a new skill for Sera, a shield that gives invincibility for both her and Lea. However, the shield saps her health over time and Sera cannot move during shielding. However, Lea is allowed. This skill will basically be required during the boss fight. I also refactored the pathfinding (again) and changed it to a more reliable way. The code is also a thousand times more readable because I fixed some encapsulation issues. In addition, there is more control over Sera's dashes now because of the refactoring. if you select a location behind an enemy that Sera needs to get to, she will dash. Using this method, you can make her dash back and forth all day. Dashes do less damage though, so it's really for repositioning purposes. But you can also group up enemies using this technique. However, I also fixed an issue where the enemies used to just target one character (Lea). This allowed Sera to body block them and they had no idea how to deal with that. They do not do that now, they ...

 Refactoring character controllers 100% complete. All the player specific code is now part of a module that the controller can optionally utilize, which will make the co-op implementation (theoretically) simple to implement. The movement effects will also be easier to add. Here's the prototype sketch for the enemies for the "boss fight". They are named Villi for a reason. Sera's pathfinding has been improved. There was a bug where she would sometimes get stuck on a corner when dashing, that no longer happens, she will automatically reposition. The pathfinding was simplified, is more readable and works better, which makes me happy. Just fixing weird bugs related to the boss fight now, but expect an actual model of the Villi soon.

Unfortunately no new pretty things to look at. The boss fight code is about 80% finished, just have one more thing I wanted to add: a new skill for Sera that players should be making use of during the fight. Still have pretty much all of the art assets to texture and still need to design the look of the new enemy. However, before that I am refactoring the entire nearly five year old character controller code. The reason is because I have some weapons that will be able to affect the controller's movement as well as other things. The current code is basically way too much stuffed into the controller and too many things are doing the same thing, the product of someone(me) who could implement certain features but not in a robust or modular way. So now I'm refactoring things so that everything is not only more simplified but more modularized and less buggy. This had to be done for a while, but I had put it off until I realized that I was just adding to more technical debt. This refa...

 Still working on first boss fight. Spent a lot (more than I would've liked) of time debugging issues with hit detection. This was mainly due to the IntersectRay method I was using to do raycasts for shooting enemies. It would just sometimes miss the colliders no matter what I did when it came to Area3Ds. There didn't appear to be a problem if the colliders were StaticObject3Ds. I'm still not sure what the issue is, but I found raycast3ds to be more reliable. On top of that, I swapped to having hurtboxes just send a signal to a database to store the enemy hurtbox inside it when the mouse entered the Area3D and remove on exit. Then I'd just call damage separately. This was extremely reliable and the player longer misses things as long as they click the hurtbox. However, I didn't want players to have to only click on enemies for it to register a hit, I wanted them to be able to click past an enemy and still hit them so long as the raycast hits, so I added some extra h...

 Working on some necessary features for first boss (spontaneous enemy spawning). I am also revisiting Sera's health loss mechanic. I'm going to remove the health loss on basic attacks (though health loss will be bigger for certain things like the oneshot attacks, mainly because using those might help you avoid even heavier health loss.) I think it's a little too difficult to manage for some people whom I've seen die in the game because of Sera's health loss mechanic more than anything else.  I plan to introduce more enemies as a result, to sort of "overwhelm" the players into having to use Lea's limited ammo instead of just hanging back and letting Sera do all the work, although I guess if players are good at juking I'll allow it, may as well be a legit way to play. Later enemies will be faster to the point Lea cannot outrun them and they will specifically target Lea.

It's the big update. Updated things on itch io with new binaries. 1. Visual overhaul. New mainmenu, updated lighting, updated GUI, updated particle effects. Replaced all prototype models and icons. More detail added. Lower resolutions are better supported now. A prologue scene has been added with some extra stuff. 2. Added a massive amount of fixes and nice to haves, Sera will automatically open doors now, have fun calling her to Lea from the other corner of the map. Key config fixed and actually saves. GUI elements scroll properly now and fit more resolutions. Enemies dissolve on death. Cameras will focus on targets of interest when applicable. 3. Fixed a lot of bugs in general. 4. A rewrite to a lot of stuff. 5. New cutscene art. 6. Lea can talk to Sera by interacting with her 7. Way smaller filesize, lots of unnecessary bloat was removed. The first boss fight is the next thing I'm working on.

The pathfinding is way better now. Sera and enemies can now navigate to a spot on the map and open all the doors on the way without prompting (Unless the door is locked, this is actually a bug in old ALAWT, Sera and enemies can open doors Lea doesn't have the required items for).The return home button can even let her run all the way across the map to Lea. Everyone's obstacle detection raycast is way better and Sera's a lot less likely to get stuck on stuff. I basically ended up rewriting the move state and the obstacle detection (which also had logic errors). Now it's not just cleaner and readable code, it's a lot more stable. It was a bit tricky though because just shooting a raycast directly towards a target sometimes led to weird results. In particular, a raycast from Sera to the lower platforms after the heavy bunker door would cause her to think there was an obstacle (the bunker door) between her and those lower platforms. She would then try to get to the lowe...

I did a lot of necessary but boring stuff. I modularized the interactable system so now it's a lot more flexible than it was before. In the past I could only have an animated interactable or one that could be picked up. Now Interactables can do both, and have extra functionality tacked on them. Fixed a countless number of bugs ranging from the enemies not pushing the players when hitting them to preventing Lea from peeking past some room occluders. Added in nice things like restoring interactable states after loading (so you don't have to resolve certain puzzles after saving and reloading. Restoring current weapon held on the characters as well as removing key items after they've been used. I rewrote some convoluted code where the logic made no sense to me and it also fixed multiple bugs. Gui element lists scroll now. Basically things are a lot more polished now, with just a few things left like needing to save custom key configs and accessibility. Working on getting a dysl...

 I'm replacing a bunch of cgs in ALAWT. It's really forcing me to try harder at drawing and I guess that's good but it also kind of sucks. I've got 2 done, but I'd like to finish up a third before considering any sort of update. I've also rewritten some lore to make things slightly more mysterious. I feel like Lea was too knowledgeable before and I want her to be less omniscient.

 Updated the very old crappy falling animations with unique ones for both Sera and Lea. They'll also do a landing animation when falling. While the characters can't really jump (mainly due to control constraints) I'm planning on some puzzles that'll require going up and down. I updated the menu and dialogue GUI to be consistent, and the dialogue boxes are all in dark mode now instead of an eyebleeding white. I also updated the main menu with a new one. I'm still debating how I'll color it and there's some improvements I could make (I am held back by my skill in 2d art), but at least it's better than the current placeholder. The last bits of visual overhaul I have to do is fix up some of the old particle effects. Sera's slash has already been updated to be a gooey red one to fit her mutated arm. Then I plan to test and put out an (small) update. The big one will contain the boss and more character interactions as well as some rewritten lore. Ideally, ...

 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.