schooliedee.bsky.social

#devtober day 26, stuck on monastery cliff It's too tall to use the cliff edges I've done for regular bounds, and unity's ice cream terrain will not look great even with the graph available. Welcome to ideas bc I can't find any concept art of this.

#devtober day 25, the rare merrow post Been working on a Merrow update for awhile to shuffle boss spells into player spells. Simple spells can work fine, but the other half has been me writing tools and finding room on the quest rom to fit 5+ new functions, and very tricky with a baby in harness.

#devtober day 24, outdoor night lights Playing with outdoor torches to help light Melrode given everyone's so worried about Bart being gone, Ralph lights these since he's always calling people lazy. Also fighting an intrusive thought to add fishing so there's a pier now etc.

#devtober day 23, starting to think about small doorways Nothing interesting today, this dumb little door has been on my mind but my door stuff embarrassingly does not support something like this existing -- will try again tomorrow when baby is less fussy lol.

#devtober day 22, more insets + garden planning Started treating the little shapes I use for inset cutouts as their own important thing and keeping their shapes as prefabs. I'd love to make the garden visible from the dorm hallway, but they don't actually seem to line up?

#devtober day 21, thinking about door insets Many of the Quest doors have frames that are cut into the wall, which adds coziness to that person's home, but my actual workflow for this feels very roundabout. I feel like people probably have nicer tools for doing this.

#devtober day 20, NPC interactables Town folks can now be aware of things they may want to interact with, like a lamp when it starts to turn dark etc. Couldn't find a close-enough bookshelf so didn't do much with their library yet.

#devtober day 19, nightlights Not worth recording anything but gave fergus a basic nightlight, they will hopefully be able to turn these on and off themselves depending on time of day but baby is very fussy tonight so that will have to wait.

#devtober day 18, starting monastery cells The props are so-so, but I need to add support for indoor light sources like candles that are only enabled at night. Lot of cohesion work to do for the interior prop shader and the dinky little monk models I did in blender.

#devtober day 17, mixing high/low tech for cliffs The tops of cliffs and mountains in the original just have little texture sheets with trees and stuff, and I'd wondered how to do that more elegantly before realizing that it was already an elegant solution and to just do that.

#devtober day 16, still melrode Stuck on a terrain editor tool so I just started painting the melrode ground instead.

#devtober day 15, more buildings textured Had an in-law volunteer to babysit for a rare dinner+movie with wife, so not much time today either but enough to finish the materials for Melrode's main buildings. Will start on the terrain and descent from monastery tomorrow.

#devtober day 14, starting exterior materials Short day today, started grouping materials for the outsides of buildings. The original roofs in Melrode have an almost rainbow effect from top to bottom, so I want to incorporate that into the appearance somehow.

#devtober day 13, interior decoration. I started assembling some close-enough models to do the Melrode home interiors, but a few things will probably need to be made manually.

#devtober day 12, replacing cozy with hand-rolled day/night lighting I'd used Cozy 3 for this in the past, but it's always felt like overkill. I spent some of the day replacing it with a simple set of gradients that I can snapshot during play mode + interior versions etc.

#devtober day 11, adding fences/walls to placement tool Kinda gloomy out today and my motivation is low along with it, so I just expanded the little cliff placer tool to include support for fences and small Brian-height walls.

#devtober day 9, projectile fixes Noticed the scaling issue a few minutes after posting yesterday (zzzz), also wrote an importer to take landmine's nice spell data sheet and write SO's for the spell graph to use that original data instead, so things feel much more familiar now.

#devtober day 8, wind cutter 2 problems To me, the Wind 1/2/3s are the most iconic spells in quest, so I want to make sure they feel ~identical to the original. Matched a bunch for the decomp after work, but I'm still missing something that makes mine converge much less.

#devtober day 7, fixing circle checks I'd borked up the encounter check awhile back and never noticed until recording yesterday, so resolved that and checked how foreign a store asset looked for Skelebat (very). Wind 2 motion was waiting on decomp, so that might be tomorrow.

#devtober day 6, working out a cave approach Trying out the spline mesher tool's cave example to see how much work is ahead of me for lighting something like Cull Hazard. Despite being extremely mint chip colored, the original has a very clean look here which will be difficult.

#devtober day 5, improving terrain tools Pretty slow day as I tried to clean up some of the editor stuff for composing stuff alongside the unity terrain. I was able to get a pretty crisp edge for the descent into the Limelin yard, so maybe explicit shapes are better here.

#devtober 4, waterfall layering Still using Limelin to work out the environment tools since it has a bit of everything, the stylized water 3 library comes with a few nice particle presets for doing waterfall effects. Brian's leg is in hell atm and I couldn't figure out why etc.

#devtober day 3, terrain drops Quest has a lot of sheer faces for its world geometry, which do not play nicely with unity's "ice cream" terrain. Started integrating @_staggart_ 's nice spine mesher + edge fusion + my terrain alpha brush as a solution, but up close needs tuning.

#devtober day 2, foot ik sinking Added a small sink range for Brian's model to help align him with the terrain. I was always bugged whenever he moved around a slope and had a visible gap between his shoes and the ground, since his stubby legs couldn't snap at that distance etc.

#devtober day 1, outsourcing the terrain blending. I've tried solving this myself a few times, so I wanted to try kronnect's nice edge fusion library. Works well but takes a bit of setup, and still getting some artifacts. Less free time this year 👨‍🍼but enough to be productive.

Quest 64 Randomizer "MERROW" v50 has arrived! hangedman.itch.io/merrow Quick patch shortcuts, shuffled enemy packs (maybe unstable), Beigis in boss shuffle, new (old) Bubble spell, and more. I delayed v50 a long time to build a big milestone, but then I ran out of space on the 'What's New' list, so,

Had an idea over the weekend for an alternative to unity's sharp tile-based terrain gaps (which are funnily incompatible with quest's sharp geometry). Got it working this morning and started integrating the new staggart environment libraries. Still working on this, just busy o7

Spent this afternoon writing a preprocessor to recognize and animate certain phrases in the Quest dialogue, without needing to add style info to the dialogue text explicitly. Also, I joined a studio and now do unity stuff for a living, but I'm still doing this too dw.

3/4 Melrode kids done, just one more for the gang. I think whoever made the "just make it exist first, you can make it good later" should win some sort of award. It's been fun getting into modeling and knowing that things will look goofy but that it's ok.

Tried the 2nd melrode kid today and had a lot of trouble with his weird head shape and odd expression. Each of the kids also has their own super exaggerated running animation, which only plays when they turn towards you, so I think they were probably meant to run around town.

Starting the Melrode kids, tried Pete today since he only seemed a little more complicated than a stationary treasure chest.

Started learning how blender's texture painting stuff works. Chest came out alright, but I probably redid the UV stuff like 4+ times.

Been going through for the last week or so and getting the blocked vertical slice building and ironing out the issues, it's slowly becoming almost playable.

Used some of the "between jobs" time to work on the enemy model silhouettes. The original commissions were very good imo, way better than I could've hoped for after providing low-res emulator screenshots.

Recorded a recap video for the #devtober work today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw9R...

Used some of the day off to finish blocking Dondoran's interiors. If you've been following this project for a while, this may seem like reverse progress, but I wanted to go back and redo some areas to sure the general feel and muscle memory came through.

The goofy system I've been using to block the dondoran building heights -- moving brian until he's on the roof.

Started blocking out Dondoran yesterday, also fiddling with the door exit animations to use root motion. It does bring the autowalk doors much closer to the original though.