Entry 23

Week 10 & 11 Worklog

Getting down to the wire...

3/26/25

Today's 4-ish hour work session consisted of retexturing the subway! I still need to throw it in engine but it's done for now

 

 

After taking a break after class, I decided to work a bit more tonight and bake my textures to get them into Unity.

3/29/25

Today I spent the first half of my work day (somewhere around 3 hours I wanna say) tying up some loose ends in my code... mainly getting the main menu to work right and fixing some issues on Press 'N Hold as well as prepping the UI toggles in that stage. Lots of UI stuff in general honestly. Also finally properly hooking up the player health mechanics because for whatever reason I haven't done that yet, oops. Not really a lot I can show visually but trust that they have been worked on. 

 

Here's Doc riding on a ball in the meantime (as Debug.Log is continuously screaming that they're taking damage lol)

 

 The second half of my day involved illustrating out most of the main menu's assets, I just need to get at the buttons (and also get a cloud behind the logo so it doesn't blend into the sky like it is right now)

 

In engine I plan on having the clouds at the bottom loop endlessly in a sort of parallax-like animation. As you can see, in clip studio I made it so that they tile seamlessly :> 

 

 

I actually didn't know clip was able to do this, and while it does take some extra steps compared to photoshop it gets the job done all the same.

3/30/25

Today I continued to work on UI Assets and I believe I've completed most of them at this point. 

 

First up is Doc's health bar, It's split into 3 different layers: the fill, the container, and the mask icon. if I can I want to make it so that when Doc's HP drops below 25% the sad mask displays, but if I can't it is what it is.

Next are the tutorial text bubbles for the Cloudskipper level and Press 'N Hold, as well as the background for the PNH countdown timer. The tutorial text will pop up on the lower righthand side of the screen to give the player the level's objective, and then disappear after awhile.

 

While I was at it I also decided to properly update FERRI's dialogue box. Its icon still needs an update.

The remaining assets I worked on today was just the main menu buttons as well as re-balancing the colors and exporting all of the clouds and background separately. Basically, everything's ready to go in engine!

3/30/25

Today began working on implementing the UI assets from the other day and getting player damage fully implemented.

For whatever reason the gif screen recorder I usually use to show my progress was giving me a hard time today so you'll just have to take my word when I say that the UI assets have been implemented and animated. I still need to find a font I like for the textboxes, but that's not too hard of a thing to add.

While testing I am also realizing I might need to implement some sort of "force level" button because oh boy the randomization is not nice sometimes and I would want folks to try both levels. It wouldn't be explicitly mentioned in game but I could have some hotkey that triggers either cloudskip or PNH. It did also seem to like it when there were more than two levels within the range so maybe I'll just duplicate a scene and hope for the best. 

4/1/25

The game's finished! April Fools no its not, BUT with the progress I've managed to make this week I can more confidently say that I should be able to have a fully playable demo for the showcase and not have to pull together a trailer last minute!

4/2/25

Admittedly today's progress was slow due to a nintendo direct giving us a release date for chapters 3 and 4 of deltarune, the game I've been fixated on for the entire time I've been at college so. oops. But my work today essentially boiled down to starting to paint the textures onto the Cloudskipper models. At the beginning of the workday I actually was trying to research on how I could maybe automate some of the process since a lot of my textures would be similar, but with how low poly my models are I couldn't really get it to work how I wanted. I want to say today's work time totaled to maybe 2 hours of focus...

4/4/25

3 hours and I finally wrapped up the work that should've been done yesterday which means all of the cloudskipper modular pieces are done! Now All I need to do is texture the structures and everything will be ready to go in-engine which I plan on getting done tomorrow.

4/5/25

Today I finished texturing the models for Cloudskipper, a process which should not have taken as long as it did but unfortunately something went so wrong and I accidentally did some texturing in a older build file from before I did the UVs properly.... so I lost about 2 hours there. 

They're done though, tomorrow I'm going to get everything in-engine.

4/6/25

Today I imported all the cloudskipper textures and got started on the actual cloud shader for the level itself, meaning I had to finally experience the horrors of... unity nodes... I say as if towards the end of my time texturing in blender I started playing around with the node system in there to try and texture the models faster.

I had a start...

 Eventually smoothened it out...

 

...accidentally made the heavens at one point

 

But eventually after loosely following a tutorial and playing around, I got some clouds I'm decently happy with!

 

I plan on maybe making another cloud shader and adding some cloud objects around the stage for decoration, but now I need to tackle lighting and the skybox. I was initally thinking of using an HDRI for the latter, but after applying one in the world it looked out of place compared to the stylization of everything else, so I ultimately decided to handpaint my own. After some trial and error, this seemed to work:

and in engine (with some volume and lighting adjustments) here's what we're working with now!

That's all for today, I still need to make some stage adjustments and mess with more post-processing, but hey it's looking more like the concept art now!

Also you've probably noticed that these past few entries have been without an hours, and that's because I have been neglecting to time myself admittedly. Also with it getting down to the wire I haven't been as focused on updating this log properly. My major workdays have been Saturdays - Tuesdays and I typically to spend at minimum 4-5 hours on Farer Dreamer work (though I do tend to take sporadic breaks so that also makes it hard to time). Today's work session was way longer that usual, likely over 10 hours... the cloud shader alone taking 3 to learn and all that. Hopefully tomorrow I can wrap up this stage.

4/6/25

I decided to start my day today by trying to make some cloud models to decorate around the stage. My thought process was that I could copy some elements from the ground cloud shader and put them on a separate object. It's worth a shot right?

well...

Its a bit hard to see in the gif but the mesh has seams, and even after increasing the poly count they still remained so that didn't solve it. Eventually I just decided to disregard it for now, as I need to fix some parts of the stage gameplay-wise as I decided to move the end section over a smidge.

(Working into 4/7/25...)

I also ultimately realized that because of the fog, that I could A. get away with using some of my greybox structures and also upscaled versions of the stage models to fill out the map more and B. maybe make some low-poly cloud models and just put them all under an empty game object and animate that to circle around the perimeter of the stage (or I could even just use the spinner platform's code). Still not sure about the latter thing, but I started to do the former and

 I think this will work nicely for filling out the environment more. It may essentially be a cloudy wasteland of ruined structures but that doesn't mean it needs to be desolate.

Anyways this weird work session mostly comprised of this and reformatting some of the stage to make it more interesting gameplay-wise and visually appealing, as honestly it went in a bit of a straight line which didn't look great from the player's perspective at spawn.

4/8/25

I should've had Cloudskip wrapped up yesterday but we're doing that today I guess. I will likely add some more polish after the 10th to this and the other stages, but for now I need to wrap things up here and move onto my other scenes.

4/9/25

Today's work session consisted of playing around with particles and finding fonts for the textboxes and UI. The particle system still needs some work but at the very least I want to have some random little floaty things around the subway. At the moment it's a Doclet infestation but... it's a start.