#01 - The Game Bible Finalization (October/November 2024)

Following the previous Devlog, work on the finalization of the game design bible, concept art making and other pre-production requirements continued for around a month, and then successfully concluded with a fully finalized set of documents.

Currently, the whole bible contains every relevant information tied to the production of the entirety of the game's planned demo release. Which is set to contain the entirety of the game's prologue.

A Time lapse of the design document. Each dot represents one document, such as the preface you saw on the video up above. The program used here is something called Obsidian, which i definitely recommend you use, as it's highly intuitive and well built.

#02 - 3D Mechanics Prototyping (October/November)

As the game design phase came to an end, I then jumped into Unity proper with the goal of developing a working, playable prototype by the end of October.

As the game will employ a Parkour Movement System with exploration, puzzle and chase sequences as the center of it's core gameplay, it was the first thing that i started working on as early as the start of October.

• The Parkour System allow the Player to wall run/Climb and jump off any given surface, safe for eventually banned surface types.

• While not showcased here, the Parkour System allows the player to also slide down walls, and swap wall run direction through a set of key combo.

• This system was designed to be as reactive and good feeling as possible, as the game will eventually features Chase Sequences as a part of it's core gameplay.

As a side note, the game is also fully playable with a controller, and all key binds will be swappable for those of a player's liking.

#04 - Hitting a wall (November/December)

While the first implementations of the game's mechanics went well, quickly enough, I ended up hitting wall after wall. First of which being due to a clear lack of technical knowledge :

• Implementing lightning was difficult, which is why it was disabled in the prototype and left "for later"

• Figuring out how to texture the walls, implement audio effects, increase the quality of the final render images or even how to animate things outside of coding them was a complete mystery to me.

• Finally, designing the first level that would see the player make full use of the parkour system proved far too difficult.

Foolishly enough, I led myself to thinking that I would be able to figure out simply enough how to at least create a fairly simple yet fun first level on my own. Needless to say, the results ended up being quite lacking in the end.

All of this added to a clear lack of technical understanding of the various aspects of using Unity outside of coding, led to wall after all. Eventually, the month of November had ended, and my "Can do attitude" quickly met with the harsh wall of reality :

Who'd have thought it true? Making game is actually hard. ~ A truly perplexed Cbrainz

In all of these hardship, however, something good ended up coming out of all this research and development : 3D Modelling.

While nothing too impressive, learning to use ProBuilder in order to model fairly simple shapes revealed to me that i was quite into building varying shapes and modeling 3D Objects for the Mainshaft Level.

All of this had now led me to clearly wanting to learn how to use Blender in order to produce far higher quality objects to use for my own levels.

Heck, it even almost makes me want to ditch the 2D visual Novel aspect of Nechauria, and move on to semi-open world levels in the liking of Honkai Star Rail, Honkai Impact open worlds levels or even Zenless Zone Zero levels.

But as of right now, per the fact that i was clearly struggling to even produce a single good Mainshaft level, this is simply something that i'll keep in mind as i advance in this project. Things are staying 2D Visual novel only when it comes to Nechauria. For now, at least.

#04 - Forgetting to Devlog, and going on a learning spree. (December/January 2025)

All of this, finally, lead us to the moment I decided i was simply not ready yet, to bring my vision to reality. Figuring out that I needed a clear foundational set of knowledge for the many aspects of building an actual environment, i decided to go back to the Unity Learn website, and take the Unity Creative Core Course.

Since the completion of the Junior Programmer course had managed to allow me to develop both the 2D Ring Battle System Prototype and later on the 3D Parkour System for the game, i decided i would have no better source for learning, than taking their other course which centred on the technical aspects of using the Unity Engine.

This whole course took roughly a month to complete, as simply rushing through without leaving me time to properly understand the many aspects i were learning about would have been.. Really stupid to do.

Side note, their course is good, but man are their mission completion notice things bugged. Heck, the damn junior programming course still shows up as incomplete to this day ffs ~ a clearly frustrated Cbrainz

The end result speaks for itself, as I believe i have managed to produce something quite good looking by the end of the course.

And thus, we now return to prototyping the rest of SotML's alpha prototype. It will be there that we will see if the skills i have learned through this course will translate into the final prototype as well as they did back with the junior programmer course.

Conclusions and end thoughts

This harrowing journey into turning one's vision into reality has taken far more twist and turns than i feel a lot of projects might have.

Be it all the way from the original mod on the MGQ Wiki, to this prototype, it is quite clear that i should learn to be a little more humble when it comes to what i can do, and how long it would take to do.

As we enter this new year of 2025 with yet another busted set of dead lines, i have decided to start taking it easy to announcing releases. By now, it is clear that i have let myself become too stressed out by still not having a build out, and also needed a good dose of reality to put me back in place.

While i do have plans for a prototype release, I'll keep them for myself for now, and simply update you all as the project advances. I do feel like this will be far more respectful to you, who have decided to follow this project into hell and back, rather than constantly giving out false hopes of an early release.

For now, we'll keep going and simply see where this ends up. And who knows? Maybe the project will truly scope up in size by the time we finally finalize it.

For now, it has been your Boi, Cbrainz, signing out and wishing you a happy, and more stable year. God knows we all need it.

Also did you see those new Cz Studios Logos? Yeah, they do be looking better than.. Whatever i had hand drawn back then lol. ~ A very proud Cbrainz