The first couple of weeks of development for Livia have been a learning experience, and I'm here To Get You Up To date:
The first Main Objective is to get the beginning area at least somewhat laid out, Livia, being a souls-like game, is heavy on exploration and traversing the map a few times over, so we need an adequate playinground to make sure that the spatial thinking on my part is right.
Downloading and setting up the assets that have been purchased for Livia, as well as a few other characters, has proven to be difficult, it's been my first real exposure to the underbelly of shaders, diffuser, lighting, and the High Definition Render Pipeline, so I've been plagued with "incomplete assets" because two packs from the same artist obviously share a lot of the same file names, which, unity assumes to simply be the same asset, and neglects to download with the rest of the package, in turn, broke my game.
... restart. Step one. Open two unity projects, one to download the assets into, the other to migrate them over, so I could get all of the files for each thing. Step two, delete the dummy project. it's just two steps... it's not like that took 6 hours to do. ... not at all. I certainly don't think my computer is on its last legs.
great. So, I had everything I needed.
Then I had to convert all the materials and shaders to the latest unity version somewhere between 2019. x and 2020.x, a unity made enough changes to the way it handles these to break my game.
at last, the characters are working. After some finagling, I figured out how blend-shapes work, as well as blend-states for animating characters more organically. Now that I had a character that could move, I could test the environment and build my terrain with the right scaling in mind.
Scale, especially when creating the terrain, is always a hard one for me.
it was at this point that I realized my computer was out of memory.
and that is the real tragedy of this dev log - I had to uninstall Genshin Impact to continue the development of this game.
if that's not dedication, then I don't know what is.
I was COMPLETELY out of memory, too. as in, in order to factor reset my computer, I had to manually delete enough things, to have enough space, to MAKE SPACE. SO I moved the project to an external hard drive. double and triple-checked it to ensure it worked, and then reset my computer to get some of that sweet, sweet space to keep building.
after re-installing unity, I attended the annual Global Game jam(stay tuned for an article on that, it's Metroidvania with a really great mechanic! - if you're lucky, you might even see it on mobile soon), and got back to work.
... the file was broken. After trying to start the project a few times, it finally opened and i decided to go through and preen my asset files for anything unrelated. most asset packs, for example, come with three sets of shaders, one for each pipeline.
so I removed the fat, and after about a 30-minute deleting spree I turn to my right monitor and realize, Livia, our flagship character, has turned green.
again with this texturing issue! I messaged the artist on discord, at 2 in the morning, and since he lives in a different country, he answered immediately, helped me fix it, and taught me a little bit about diffusion, lighting, and shaders. So then, I decided to work on the terrain system a bit to get the intro area at least a little bit fleshed out. after about another hour, I got this result and wrote an update for the Dev-log for Livia (hint: you're reading it!).
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