Chromatic Devlog

You're gettin good with that sword!

I'm sure that between the Deltarune, Splatoon, Xenoblade, Zelda, Splatoon, Hello Kitty Party, and Kingdom Hearts announcements, many of you have one question on your mind: What's happening with Chromatic?

I'm doing better than I thought possible by a lot, actually.

Last week, I thought I had about 3 weeks of work ahead of me. This past Sunday, I got on a plane from NYC to SF (for work) and literally just hammered out game work the whole time. And I finished probably 80% of what I wanted to finish in 3 weeks.

That's awesome. For one thing, it means that this stretch of work will be done very shortly. I have to finish like an animation and 3 sounds. We're gonna wrap it up like that, and this week I aim to both finish it off and start other stuff, basically cutting my time estimation in half. For a second thing though, it means that there's a way for me to speedrun development somewhat under the right circumstances. I'm left asking myself: how can I replicate this? How can I leverage the forces I tapped into on this plane ride to be as efficient as possible?

I think the main thing is lack of distraction: On a plane, no one talks to you, you don't have anything to attend to, and most importantly there is no wifi. I think that if I want to take this project as seriously as possible, I'll have some sort of regular session where I sit somewhere and replicate these conditions; turn off my wifi and just go somewhere somewhat boring to lock in, maybe with timed breaks for snacks and things like that. My girlfriend suggested doing this at the library with some regularity and I'm very keen on that idea. I will update with how it pans out.

In the meantime, I'm mostly excited for my flight home, and so is my JIRA board, which has already served to remind me of some loose ends I need to tie up before I can close this arc of work.

Today we're gonna talk about how to make games and how to write about doing that

Been a bit without a devlog, which is fine! With the new chapter 1 patch out a bit of a break was definitely appropriate. And it's not like I haven't been working. This will be a longer devlog, so table of contents:

Devlogs going forward

Into the unknown

Into the defined

Devlogs and Updates Going Forward

So I'm now mostly working on new content, slash parts of the game nobody has ever seen before. Because of this, I'll be talking a bit less about the literal content of the game that I'm making to not spoil anything, while still mentioning enough to keep things interesting. These logs will also as a result become a bit more autobiographical, I'll talk more about my thoughts on the game and how development is going, how my life is going if that's relevant, etc.

I'll be sure to still keep things interesting and on topic! But there might be musing here and there ;P

As for updates to the game, don't expect a ton? Some new stuff that doesn't need to exist for chapter one will go into the first area and that will be in future updates. And I will also be taking notes and bugfixing from playtesting sessions.

The biggest way I will update players in the future is through mini demos of little pieces of the game, such as interesting rooms, boss fights, or challenges. Little web playable snippets of the game are a good way for me to give potential fans sneak peeks of the game without putting huge chunks of nonlinear map out all the time. There are concepts of a plan for what the first one of these will be.

Into The Unknown

So I'm now doing stuff that I haven't done in a long long time, designing new rooms and new content for the game. I have been working on this over the past 3 weeks or so. It's exciting and fun! This decision making phase is really where the important parts of game dev happen, in my opinion. That's scary to an extent. I want to make the right decisions such that this game takes the shape that I want. But this is a part of the process you can't really get through with any sort of tutorial. You very much have to trust your instincts. Let's see if mine are worth listening to. Nervewracking. Feeling very "arms in front yelling babababa" about this.

All that said, I think I kind of forgot my workflow for this sort of thing, so I've been freestyling a bit, but that sort of thing doesn't work for me so well. So I've created a JIRA board and scoped out the next 3 weeks ish of work. I'm also going to work on my scoping, estimating how long tasks will take me and comparing them to how long it actually takes me so I can scope properly. My goal for the forseeable future will be 5-10 hours a week. Speaking of...

Into the Defined

This next week I'm not setting any concrete goals for myself as MTG championships are this coming weekend. But after that I will start a more regimented / structured pattern of working on this project. June will be a good month for Chromatic.

I'll be finishing up a piece of the game I've spent a good bit of unstructured time working on already, that being a bit of plot stuff between chapter 1 and the second area. I really like how it's looking, but we'll see if I can execute on it.

Anyways, I'm going to submerge myself in cards for the next 120 hours. See you later!

The codebase cleanup is DONE!!!!!!

Got a bunch of bug fixes nailed out this week, and as a result, there's a new build up on itch! (https://chromaticdev.itch.io/chromatic-chapter-one) This version is important because it's the first version published after the save data refactor, meaning this is the first version you can play and have your save data preserve into future versions of Chromatic. I'll probably list the specific bug fixes in itch patch notes tomorrow, at least the ones I can remember. There's too much here to count and commit messages only help so much.

Now there is technically one thing left to do for the "codebase cleanup" and it's reimporting all my sprites into aseprite files. That's pretty easy but tedious, it will probably take me all week, so new content development starts NEXT week!

I have not devlogged in a bit, but that's less about me not doing anything and more about me doing so much that I don't really know how to write about it, especially since it's been a lot of in person stuff and finishing the very long term, very large scope hitbox refactor.

Living In Real Life

I went to another playcrafting dev night to get some more eyes on my game and talk to some more game devs! Was awesome to get another experience to exhibit locally, and I'll definitely be coming out to more events like this.

I also went to PAX East! I love this con, and I loved getting to play other awesome games from fellow indie devs - everything I saw there was super impressive and very motivational. I didn't exhibit myself this time around because the game just isn't there, but I definitely would love to in the future. Places where these games come out of the digital world and into physical community are very special to me. I also cosplayed one December Holiday Deltarune, which was super fun, and I got recognized a lot more than I thought I would. Cosplaying an entirely fanon design of a character was definitely a bucket list item of mine so I'm super glad I did it, I love weird fan culture stuff like that.

As for actual game progress...

The hitbox refactor is finally over!

I recoded I would estimate maybe 30-40% of the entire game. Everything from how the player and enemies handle combat, damage, i frames, hitstun, everything was completely torn down and rebuilt in a new system that allows for increased flexibility and easy / straightforward implementation of every enemy and obstacle I will create from here on out. I don't think it would be very fun to read if I went into more detail on this, but know that it was just a lot a lot of work and I'm euphoric to be done with it, as working on the rest of the game is so close.

What's next?

There are still a good few bugs I want to solve after the last playcrafting session, so that's next on the docket. My goal for this coming week is to take care of those and put out a new, shiny build for people to play with all those bugs fixed. There will undoubtedly be a couple things that slipped through the cracks with this crazy refactor, so I'll be putting out patch builds regularly so people can play chapter 1 with the best experience possible.

After that, I'll probably spend about a week on migrating all of my sprites over to asesprite. Anyone have a good podcast?

Then it's on to developing new content! Woohoo, finally! So exciting.

As you can see, things are going quite well for my hitbox refactor. Let me take a moment to explain even what that is.

Basically, any interaction between a player and enemy or anything similar such as spikes is hard coded. For the player, this used to be in the inventory script, because I originally considered health as part of the inventory. Similarly, methods for enemies to take damage would be in the enemy script. These hard coded interactions also made it so that this functionality was directly tied to the same collider on everything: an enemy's collider that defines how it fits into space had to be the same one that defined where it could be hit and where it hit the player. This also was true for the player, which has caused problems with needing to shrink the players hitbox during an attack allowing them to clip into walls.

Now, hitboxes and hurtboxes are separate scripts, allowing entities to have separate colliders for each, and also allowing for more flexibility when assembling objects that can take or deal damage. You now have to write no new code to do something like getting a certain enemy to play a certain sound when it gets hit.

This update also totally unraveled the player's inventory script. Not only did I factor the health out of it, but inventory used to for some reason manage disabling / enabling the player as well. That's been moved to the player state manager. It now only manages items, currency, and other collectibles.

As you might be able to tell, this is a pretty huge change to a lot of the game's core systems, hence the image you see above. I've worked through it quite a fair bit though: all the errors you see above are fixed, and the project can now be opened outside of safe mode... yay?!

After last week, all of the small issues I know about are squashed, which means something terrible: I actually have to tackle larger improvements.

The most major change this week, which you can see above, was retooling the main menu. The title looks much better here, and the background is more neutral, anticipating a time when people might be starting the game in another area. Buttons are more readable / standardized, and can be navigated with arrows / controller instead of just a mouse like I had before. This required me to work a lot with unity UI, which is never the best time, but I'm pretty pleased with the result.

Aside from that, codebase cleanup continued. For some godforsaken reason when I was originally creating this project whenever I needed an object to reference a prefab (a cloneable object such as a projectile, item, or particles) I would instead keep the references in a library object instead of on the object that actually cared about the prefab (so instead of being like "spawn(coin)," I would have to say "spawn(library.coin)"). This could be defensible if I wanted to routinely switch out these objects or refactor them, but in most cases they were entirely unique and at most were used in 5-6 other scripts. All of those are cleaned up now.

The end of codebase cleanup is on the horizon! It's been such a tedious and not very fun process, but there are only really two major things left to do. The hardest one will be hitbox / hurtbox abstraction, which I've started already and it is UGLY! The second will be easy but very time consuming: moving all my project files to aseprite, as my aseprite files got wiped a while ago when my laptop bricked. Hopefully I'll be done with these within the month.

Anyway, with finishing codebase cleanup on the horizon, I've started to think on / prepare area two, which I'm VERY excited to work on. The enemy list is almost final, and starting to sketch out room / story design. Can't wait to show you all.

Another pretty productive week. The principal change I made was updating the shop so that instead of those big, ugly descriptions, you can now ask about items as you see fit and get the info told to you by the friendly keep. Awesome.

Less interesting than that is a tonnnnn of bug / issue fixes - another thing you can see in the gif is that now the player animates during dialogue. Warping is now more functional, fish are smoother, and I made some improvements to the directional attack tutorial based on my last playcrafting exhibition, among other things. Also did some moving and adding objects to make the level design flow a bit better.

Thinking about when I want to release a new build - will probably be around whenever I get to make it out to another exhibition. Or maybe PAX if I don't get out to one before then.

Many changes this week were in "retiming" things: one thing you need to be very careful of in game programming is tying operations to framerate. Since most code runs frame-by-frame, any code that does something like moving an object or general progressing a gradual process needs to be scaled by time in order to happen consistently.

This was cropping up as an issue as my computer was running a bit slow during my recent exhibition and it would cause certain objects to move very slowly during play. In order to scale these operations so that they can be experienced accurately on any device at any time, they need to be scaled by how much time is passing each frame.

Some things I improved this way this week were camera scrolling, прс movement, and dialogue speed.

Other than that, it was just some misc stuff: the voidmite in the bottom of the world became a bit more clever, and I've made some easy fixes like adjusting hitboxes.

This next week will be more bug fixes from exhibition feedback, as well as continuing the post-ch1 feedback if I have time.

I’ll probably be making a fleshed-out “devlog” post about once a week along with more scattered thoughts here and there.

All info about the game, including links to download, website, trailer, and all socials can be found at https://linktr.ee/Chromatic_Game

Also, all posts will be cross posted to my main @elesh-n

Excited to be starting a devlog and joining the indie game dev community on Tumblr!