Arcanus Cella Games

i originally had almost like a journal-like, day-to-day kind of progress written, but that’s so dry and I really don’t wan’t to just put up filler writing like that on here. I suppose it’s a good way to oversee everything I’ve done in between posts, but I should at least rewrite it hahah.

starting off strong

coming off the last blog post i quickly got to work and essentially just made a leever enemy. It was a little more simpler than i thought, but it did come with some of its own headaches. I’m probably going to end up changing the way it works because I should have just made the digging up and down an animation instead of actually trying to move the gameobject up and down the world terrain… ya live and learn i suppose.

the challenge with this enemy to the player is to either keep running and risk activating more of its kind, or maneuvering around it since it has poor turning. this thing is deadly in tight spaces and in big numbers, so i’ll need to keep that in mind for placing them.

music finally!

i also went on opengameart.org and got some music. I made sure to write the names down in the filenames and artists for credit (since i’m not going to be making music for this anytime soon). But now with music, the empty world suddenly feels a lot less empty… i bet adding some natural ambience would make it feel even bigger. this also makes me want to submit some stuff onto opengameart as well…

progress slowdown

either from burnout or lack of change in environment, progress slowed quite a bit for about a week. It was a real slog getting started on work and my belief is that the tasks I had on my plate were so overwhelming that without chunking them down, my monkey brain just decided to work on other things and even entertained the idea of a different game project.

luckily i recognized the other game project as the siren it was and after writing down the tasks and breaking them down into their own tasks, I enlisted the aid of a pomodoro timer to keep me on track.

but more importantly, I think what really helped was being stricter with my schedule after clocking out of the dayjob. Essentially, I speedran making food, eating, washing dishes and other responsibilities like old-dog walking and general living space maintenance. all this to clear my time and headspace.

im guessing doing all this efficiently and before working on the game flips the boolean in my brain that there are no other responsibilities that need attention so that I can focus focus on the following pomodoro timed work sessions.

• re-type controls panel on title screen.
  • add a premise somehow to guide player
• make a scene for the “extras IDK” door
  • the credits on one side and supporters on the other.
  • or just use the camera mover and make it a small chamber in the title screen
• make player death work
  • connecting graveyard prefab to player manager
  • moving the player back to their campfire.
  • fade in and out vr players camera
• fix sword for player
  • make another model, current one is bad.
  • color it using the main object material
• have 3 campfires placed in total. the starting area, the bug village and not too far off from the dungeon entrance.
  • make campfire heal the player on attack.

we’re a workin’ again

in three 25-minute work sessions i was able to knock out the above list that for some reason I dreaded coming to home to. i dont want to sound like a shill but just one of these tasks would be all the progress done on a bad night. idk if this is just novelty combined with placebo but I’m going to ride it until i need to look for the next productivity method.

anybut that’s the state of the game so far, i added the simple premise on the title screen that gives some direction to the player… As far as playable builds go, i just need to add a win state (of finding your brother) and we’ll have a game! (with programmer art everywhere, debug sfx + creative commons music and an unfinished world) but still, then I can get feedback!

so until the next post!