The fourth week of Pageturner 3's development is over.
Here's what I did:
- Started work on the interrogation minigame.
- Added support for plugs in the node game. It's now 34% complete.
I was hoping that I'd be able to squeeze in actually meeting my goals for the week given a few extra days, but that didn't happen. The truth is that I was daunted by trying to create the interrogation minigame in just one week, and so I kept putting it off... on top of that I made some story decisions that required rewrites. The result? Not much development got done.
That can happen when I set too big of a goal in too short a time. Sometimes I rise to meet the challenge, but sometimes it freezes me up. So I'm putting the interrogation minigame in the "complete over the course of the entire project" slot, alongside the node game — that will let me refine it so it won't feel rushed.
I'm still working out the details since I want it to be different than the other interrogation minigames in say, Detective Grimoire, L.A. Noire and the Sherlock Holmes games.
The tricky part is that Pageturner 3 has twelve suspects, and I don't want players to get overwhelmed, or to have to do too much coding. At the same time, it would be cool if players could get to know the suspects more — but that requires more writing.
In any case, for Week 5, I'm going to complete Chapter 1, and implement Achievements, which I'd held off on. Hopefully by giving myself a smaller goal, I'll go beyond it. Or not.
Another reason I didn't meet my goal is that I got distracted with Broken Spirits. I was excited about importing animations from Mixamo onto the characters. It's a great workflow, and ended up being super easy.
Now I can have high-quality motion capture animation instead of having to animate the walk, run, idle cycles completely from scratch for every character, which will speed up development greatly, letting me put more time into modeling the characters. It feels much more like a "real game" now.
Then I thought I'd try to update the project to the High Definition Render Pipeline. That was waaay too graphics intensive, it was running at like 3 fps on the simplest scene, making development impossible. So I downgraded to the Universal Render Pipeline, and it screwed up all the materials, so I spent several hours getting them to look right. But in the end URP ended up looking bad and it lacked a lot of features I was relying on, so I reverted back to the original render engine I was using (good thing I had a back up).
Then I made a breakthrough in terms of modeling character heads and I stayed up until 6 AM modeling Yoshinori (Midori's uncle). I'm now able to achieve a greater level of detail for the characters. Once development begins on Broken Spirits in earnest, I'll go more in depth about it.
So anyway, it was a very productive week, despite not meeting my Pageturner 3 goals.
Until next time,
— LockedOn.
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