Dear friends, hello,
It has been three months since my last development report. The main reason is that I wanted to focus more energy on development, sprinting hard, so I didn’t have the energy to write a development log. But I still wrote this development log. Let’s talk about the overall development situation first:
Art: Because we want to present the fictional Three Kingdoms world in my father’s and my heart, we spent the most time on art resources.
Characters: The character designs drafted by my father are basically completed, with about 80-100 types of characters participating in the actual game levels. Then there’s the character polishing done by me, with about 5 left unfinished, which I’m currently working on intensively. I also revised some previously designed characters that were not quite reasonable, including the main character controlled by the player.
Animation: Animation was done after I completed the character polishing. I replaced the previous main character’s animation, and now it looks smoother and more powerful than before. At the same time, I also did animation rigging for some generals participating in the game. Currently, there are 3-5 generals whose animations are not yet completed. In the past few months, we also adjusted some curves in the enemy animations to make them more harmonious overall. However, due to the large number of enemies, we might not have taken care of all of them, and we will update any disharmonious animations gradually.
UI: The UI was initially designed simply, with functionality in mind. So after releasing the Demo, many friends raised some issues. The current version has already updated most of the UI textures and modified most of the UI logic, including the start screen, menu, character status HUD, dialogue UI, loading screen, etc., making it more in line with player habits and more comfortable to look at.
Effects: We updated some effects. In terms of process, some BOSS effects in the later stages of the game will look better. Of course, we will also optimize the effects of early-stage enemies when we have time.
Programming:
Dialogue System: We have optimized the gam
dialogue system logic. Before, I don’t know why, but I was reading the tables sentence by sentence, and I thought it was pretty good to link them all manually. But now it’s automated, reducing performance consumption and improving my work efficiency.
AI: The overall character AI is basically completed. We made some minor changes to the character AI logic, such as refining the protagonist’s distance detection; if the protagonist doesn’t come, the AI behavior won’t be triggered. We optimized the AI logic of some common enemy soldiers and BOSSes.
Data: I also optimized some data, discarding unnecessary data, mainly to facilitate later maintenance.
ControllerFeel: I adjusted the details such as the player’s running speed, acceleration, hang time, etc., and now it feels more comfortable to operate than the previous Demo. I added some frame-holding effects, and I personally think the effect is still okay. Of course, frame-holding is something that a thousand people have a thousand experiences with, and I will continue to modify it based on everyone’s feedback.
Currently, these are the main tasks I’ve done in the past three months. I don’t want to talk too much about how difficult it is to develop alone, but I really can’t help the slow progress of development.
Next, let’s talk about the current situation. After parting ways with the company I worked for last October, I started full-time independent development + job applications. Because jobs are not easy to find now, and I don’t want to go back to the first-tier cities to struggle, so I chose to wait. This period has been quite challenging for my savings and mental state. So I also want to focus more on development and not care about things outside of development, including writing logs and socializing. Basically, I stayed at home for a month during the New Year and hardly went out, slept late and got up late, and gained almost five kilograms… This lifestyle is too unhealthy, I advise everyone not to do this…
During this time, I also had the idea of quickly releasing an EAA version of the game and then updating it slowly. But after careful consideration, I think it’s better to be cautious with this opportunity, even though development might take longer. To be honest, after all, once THE RIGHTEOUSNESS: SANGUO is done, I don’t know if this is my first game or my last game, so I’d rather make THE RIGHTEOUSNESS: SANGUO satisfactory within my capabilities before showing it.
After rushing for three months, I have also found a new job. This makes me have mixed feelings. First of all, finding a job means I won’t starve to death, and the game will continue to be developed in my spare time. But the new job is quite tiring, and the time for game development has been greatly reduced. Currently, I only develop for about 2 hours a day when I get home, and only on weekends do I have more time to develop, so I can only return to the old schedule and keep going. Work may never be finished, but THE RIGHTEOUSNESS: SANGUO will always be completed, haha~
I’ve written quite a bit in this development log, mainly to let friends who still care about THE RIGHTEOUSNESS: SANGUO know that I’m safe. Of course, if you don’t care, it’s okay, it’s never too late to start caring!
That’s it for this development log, thank you for reading this far.
Developer
Carter Chang
Email: [email protected]
Weibo: 黄金阿鲁卡多