Tuesday Devlog!

I’ve mostly been relaxing the past few weeks playing through the Kingdom Hearts games. I’m playing through 358/2 right now and I’m having fun despite it being seen as one of the weaker games in the series. Last night I started feeling more motivated to do some more work on texturing some of my models for the game.

I think the break’s been good because I’ve been working almost every single day on my games for the past few months and not really taking any days off.

I’ve made a few interesting discoveries over the past few days.

1. The Atari Jaguar’s patents were released and the console was put into the public domain by Hasbro in 1999. There’s forums for developing on it.
2. There’s a lot of resources for developing homebrew games on the SEGA Dreamcast.

Upon finding that out I have a lot more motivation to work on this game lol. It’d be cool if after finishing making Dream Diver that I remake it for the Dreamcast. There’s other Dreamcast homebrews on Itch too so it’s not unrealistic for me to do that one day. It wouldn’t be for a few years at least, but it’d be a nice thing to have as a long term goal. I figure since the game I’m working on is going for that sort of vibe anyway I could go the extra mile one day.

Speaking of that, when I was playing through 358/2 Days I realized it was pretty much a very polished PS1/N64 game, so I was inspired to try doing a low poly Sasha model cause of that. Turns out making the Cirno fumo was a good idea cause it gave me practice making a more humanoid model. It’s pretty rough right now and I’ve only really done any texturing that’s not rough texturing on the face so I’m not looking at a mannequin lol. I’m probably not gonna use any models like this in the game cause it might make it really laggy, but I have a feeling that practicing doing this is going to come in handy in the future. I’m gonna kinda just work on this and possibly make low poly models of other characters when I feel up for it. She currently looks much better from the front than the side lol. I’m pretty much gonna finish her hair then work on making the model’s mesh laid out better.

Most of what I’m gonna do is working on texture mapping and texturing models. I’ve got a couple more I need to make but they won’t take that long. I started working on finishing these last night.

I feel like I’m mostly done. The last few things I need to do are texture mapping / rough texturing for the models, doing rough drafts for the battle animations, fixing the story up, then copying everything I need to a new project. Having a development and release project might seem tedious, but it’ll help keep the released game more streamlined.

After looking into Dragonbones, I found out it’s a skeletal animation and not really suited for frame by frame animation. I found out another plugin that’d be much simpler that’s probably more what I want.

Another idea I had was inspired by playing through Kingdom Hearts 2, but collecting materials from battles to make optional nicer equipment would probably be fun to implement.

That’s it for now. I’m setting a soft deadline for Halloween, so hopefully I’ll be able to have it out by then.