Hey there,

Kinda hard to say this but going to go on an indefinite hiatus. This month I got hit with sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) which is when you suddenly and rapidly lose hearing. For the vast majority of cases, the cause for this is unknown, so you'll just wake up one day with no hearing in one ear. Fortunately, it only happened to my left ear, so I can still with my right and have a regular conversation with people. Unfortunately, the loss in my left ear is classified as "severe" for low frequencies and most likely I'll have at least some permanent hearing loss, and that's even if the treatments are successful.

I will say, I was really lucky to have a great ENT doctor that's giving me every chance to recover whatever hearing I can. From the moment the hearing loss occurs, you're basically on a time limit to try and recover and heal. There does seem to be some good improvement in my hearing especially in the higher frequencies, but I'm still "severe" for the low frequencies.

Before:


Test 5 days later with improvements:


So something that's going to be taking a lot of my free time now is to do hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which may help me recover. The treatment needs to be done continuously every weekday for 4-5 weeks, for 2-hour sessions. Including the travel, this will pretty much take up all of my free time over the weekdays. I spoke with my boss and I can have a much more flexible schedule since we're work-from-home, but will most likely be working noon - 8 pm. Don't be too worried about my health though, since even if there's no further improvement from today, I can still live normally just with some inconveniences.

Even if I didn't get this health problem, I was probably going to step away. I feel like there are a couple of people who read these monthly devlogs since I get the occasional comments and thumbs up, so sorry for letting you guys down. I really just want to focus on my health and other general aspects of my life. Over a long period of time, it does get pretty stressful since I always put pressure on myself to spend time outside of working hours to do more game development so that I can get closer to my goal. I think a proper break is something that I need right now.

I have to say, I'm really glad I even started making Bright Red Skies. I don't think I've ever worked on anything as diligently as I have in the development of BRS. I definitely learned a lot in a technical sense, and I feel like I gained some discipline that helps me in my general day-to-day. I'm also, grateful for game development since I have a dream that I want to achieve now. I may not be any time soon, but at least there's a target I can always try to reach.

I don't want to make any promises, so I won't say I'm going to start posting after a certain period of time. But maybe one day, months or years from now you might see a new BRS devlog. It's been fun, thanks for all you guys that have been following along! :)

Hey there!

For September the weapon drop/pick up is completed, the weapon shop UI was updated to increase readability, and a new room type was added to help mask the loading between floors.

Weapon drops were added to the game, which is pretty standard for any FPS haha. So as you get closer to the drop the stats and their difference to your current weapon will display so you can make a quick decision on if you want to swap for it or not. The size of the info UI shrinks as you get closer to it too, so you can see the info no matter how close you are.



As mentioned in the previous devlog, I noticed that the weapon shop UI needed so way to compare the stats with your current weapons so you don't have to memorize if the weapon in the shop is better or not. So made the update and you can switch between which of your current weapons you want to compare with now, and the stats difference will appear next to the store weapon stats.



The last thing I added was a new room to try and mask the loading between floors. Took some inspiration from the Halo 2 section where you're in an elevator while the rest of the scene loads. So after you beat a floor, there's going to be a room with an elevator that will only stop after all the necessary loading is done for the next floor. I want the game to feel more seamless and having a generic loading splash screen I feel would take you away from the game but having everything continuous I feel should keep you more engaged.



I think that was a pretty decent amount of work to be done for September. Managed to get part of the core systems like the weapon drop and loading room completed, as well as some visual updates in the new weapon shop UI. Need to work towards getting the core loop implemented and tested.

So, for October what I want to do is:

• Add and test room and enemy layouts
  
• Design and implement ideas for room rewards with some roguelike element

Thanks for following along you guys, mean a lot! I'll see you next month for the next one! :D

Hey there!

For August felt like there needed to be some more variety in the combat so I created the first melee enemy. I also implemented the weapon shop UI.

So previously, this FPS game only had ranged units which is the walker mech and the bullet & rocket turrets. But since they were ranged units, making them fast would probably make them too difficult especially for enemies on the first floor. But I wanted there to be some kind of pressure to make you want to move around so that's why this melee enemy was created!



The idea with this enemy is that it will chase you and move faster than you can. When you come into range it'll lock onto a position a bit farther back than your current position, wait a bit to give you some visual indication that it's doing an attack, then charge the point. It's not meant to be a hard enemy when alone, but when there's a lot of them and when dealing with ranged enemies they can get pretty difficult.

Also, if they hit anything, they'll do a little knockback like this:



I also worked on creating the weapon shop UI. I personally think it looks pretty good, but in retrospect, I'm thinking that it should probably show some stats comparisons to the weapons you currently have. I also think from a quality of life perspective, you should be able to select which gun you want to replace after you buy the new gun. Additionally, there's nothing implemented right now for dropped weapons and I feel like you should still be able to pick your old gun up if you made a mistake with the purchase, so that's something that needs to get made.



Going to be honest here, but I feel like this month was OK but pretty light on my side project work. I got really into a game called Battle Brothers and I've been playing it sooo much haha. Might need to pull the trigger and hit it with the uninstall, but still on the fence about that. :P

Anyways, for September what I want to do is:

• Dropped weapons pickup and equip
  
• Elevator to hide level generation and loading
  
• Continue to work on game feel

And that's all I have for this devlog, thanks you guys for following along! Cya next month with some more updates! :D

Hey there!

For July I spent time continuing to work on the FPS game. Specifically, I finished the design and implementation of the hub area, created the dialogue system, updated the room door system, and made changes to try and improve the game feel. I know this is the page for Bright Red Skies, but these devlogs have pretty much turned into a monthly update on any projects I've been working on gamedev-related haha.

Anyways, the first thing I did was finish off the hub area. Added in some props to fill in the empty spaces and try to make the area look more believable. The walls were looking really empty so I added some wiring to make the area look more technological and full. Put in some security cameras that periodically rotate and added some temporary characters. Yes, these are BRS character models for anyone that's observant :p




With the temporary characters in the room, I started to work on the dialogue system. The dialogue system doesn't need to be too intricate since the interactions will just be text and options. I felt like the bubble text boxes from BRS wouldn't fit this game so I did some research on other games' dialogue systems and I liked this style the most:



I also added generic dialogue events that can be triggered when you either reach a certain dialogue node or select a certain dialogue option. These events can be anything from updating data that might affect future dialogue or events that do stuff to the environment. For example, in the hub area, the doors won't open until you talk to the control operator.



Speaking of the doors, the door generation system got an update. Previously, when a room spawned, it would have the doors be created wherever there was an entrance. The problem here is that each intersection would have two doors which doesn't make sense. And when walking slowly towards the doors, you would be able to see them open at different times. So instead, the doors are being created separately, so they only get made once.



The last thing I did was do a little bit of work trying to improve the game feel. While testing the game, I felt like having a stamina bar for running felt pretty bad, and looking into it, it seems like a lot of people don't like running stamina for most FPS games. So now you can run as long as you want. The stamina will only be used for special abilities. I also played around with the speed/acceleration numbers to make the movement feel better.

I think that was a pretty decent amount of work done and next month I want to continue working on the shops. There's a weapon, armor, and upgrades shop but the information that needs to be displayed is really different between the three shops. So they need to be developed individually. I also want to add in a new enemy type since there are no melee enemies in the game yet. I want to try and hide the level loading so I want to add an elevator in the game where you'll be stuck until the level is finished loading, to make it feel more seamless.

So for August what I want to do is:

• Weapon shop UI
  
• New melee enemy type
  
• Elevator to hide level generation and loading
  
• Continue to work on game feel

Well, that's all for this devlog! Thanks for giving this a read and I'll see you guys next month for some more updates! :D

Hey there!

For June, as I mentioned in my previous devlog, I would spend my time working on the FPS game instead of Bright Red Skies. So what I did was work on the title screen, improved the damage feedback, and started to create the template for the lobby room.

For the title screen, I was thinking about what I wanted to show and decided to show the giant doors leading out of the lobby and into the main part of the game. Since the game is a roguelike, this is probably something that you'll have to see a bunch of times. The scene is pretty static so to add some motion, I just added some camera movement as you move the mouse around.



Wanted to also add some better feedback when you get hit, to try improve the game feel. So now there's an effect that appears when you take damage, so it's a weak blue color when taking damage to your shields and when you start getting dealt damage to your health it will pulse a strong red. There are also pointer indicators to show you which direction you're getting shot from. Also, when you take enough damage and die, you'll get transported back to the beginning, but more into that later on.





To create a hub area, there's a lobby room that will exist on all of the floors. This is where you can use your resources to purchase weapons, armor, and upgrades as well as talk to the other competitors. For now, it's still pretty rough, but most of the parts of the lobby are all there it just needs to be more filled in and the lighting needs some tuning to look better. Here's a sketch of the layout that I drew before starting to work on implementing it in the game:



In-game:




So you may be wondering what the premise of the game is since I haven't mentioned it before. Well, the game is a roguelike FPS with an anime theme so when coming up with the concept I was trying to find a way to merge roguelike, FPS, and anime together. So the idea I came up with is that the game will take place in a tournament since tournament arcs are really common in animes. I took a lot of inspiration from episodes 6 & 7 of Kino's Journey, where a character name Kino is thrown into a coliseum where competitors duel each other in a tournament format. The winner of the duel has the option of letting their opponent surrender so they can leave the battle with their lives and that's something I also want to incorporate into the game. Where killing your opponent will give you a useful item for your run, but sparing your opponent may lead to a better ending. Instead of making it just a couple of boss fights, I added in the procedurally generated rooms to add randomness and these will be the "trials" that you need to get through before you face your opponent.

To make the replayability of the game make sense in this fictional world, there will be a bag that the player owns that connects the multiple dimensions of the universe. So when you die, you begin playing as a version of yourself from a different dimension except some of the items you had in your previous run are shared in this new version of yourself. Yeah, the concept may be strange, but it's a fictional universe so anything goes. :p

Something I want to prioritize though is the gameplay since making a fun game is one of my main goals with developing this game. So there is going to be a dialogue system where you can talk to the different competitors and learn more about them but you can completely skip that part and still play the game no problem. It's more of an extra part of the game if you're interested in the characters or lore.

Anyways, you might have noticed that there wasn't really too much done this month. Unfortunately, I only spent about half of the month working on this game. Real-life is keeping me busy and we were on a bit of a crunch at my day job, I did the GMTK 2021 game jam, and I took the 2nd dose of Moderna that wrecked me for about 5 days. I hate making excuses, and now it's 2 months in a row of not hitting the milestones that I wanted to hit. Trying not to spiral into an unproductive cycle, so will try my best to get back to a better pace for July.

For July what I want to do is:

• Finish the lobby
  
• Dialogue system
  
• Better lighting
  
• Improve game feel (movement and gunplay)
  
• Change the implementation of the doors connecting the rooms

That's all I got for this devlog! And as some random guy just trying to live the dream of making a game, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to read all the way up to the end. See you for the next one! :D

Hey there!

For May I worked on the FPS project. There was a list of small to medium level bugs I was putting off for a while so I started working through them. This ranged from things like the weapon HUD not flipping back in some cases, to the jumps being really unresponsive. But I feel like I got it to a point where the core movement is feeling pretty decent. It's nowhere near Apex Legends level, but its at a point that I'm happy with.

Speaking of movement, one of the new features I added was wall running. It's honestly hard to say how much of a tactical advantage wall running will have but it just feel cool so added it in the game lol. I can see some rooms having platforms you can wall run between to run away from enemies, but this is something I'm going to need to experiment more with.



Another thing I added is the shotgun which made me have to create a new type of weapon that can spawn multiple projectiles. This might lead to some interesting weapon ideas in the future like multi-shot rockets or a snipe similar to the Triple Take.



I'm also working to get this first level completed so I actually do a play-through and test stuff like weapon balance and pacing. I don't want each of the floors to take forever to complete, but I also don't want you to be able to speedrun them in a couple of seconds. I keep the room a consistent 100x100 units to make thing easier on me, and here are some of the room ideas:



So for Bright Red Skies, sorry guys but I didn't do any work on it. I usually do this thing where I work on the FPS project for the majority of the month, the work on BRS for the last week. But I got a bit swamped with other life responsibilities this last week. In general, working on two pretty big projects at the same time isn't exactly the smartest thing, but it feels hard to just leave BRS alone since it's the main reason I'm even interested in game development.

If anyone is reading all the devlogs, I previously mentioned that at the 6-month mark of the FPS project I'm going to reevaluate where I want to go with things. So that point would be at the end of June. I'm really enjoying making this new game, but I feel like more progress needs to be made on it, so for June, I'm going to do no work on BRS again. It might even be longer than a month before I touch BRS again, I'm not 100% sure. Since I only work on these games as a side project, I see the FPS game optimistically being a 2-year project whereas BRS is more like a 10-year project. The goal is to release a game I'm proud of and I see both having some potential, except one will take a lot less time to complete.

I'll try and put my try-hard pants on for June and what I want to complete is:

• Start & defeat screen
  
• Better feedback (take damage effect, knockback)
  
• Template for the lobby room
  
• Dialogue system

Next devlog I'll go into more detail about the premise of this FPS game. I think the concept is pretty bizarre but it's supposed to be an anime-inspired game so I feel like weirdness is all good ;) I want it to mainly focus on gameplay but there are some characters you can talk to, so a dialogue system needs to be added.

But anyway, thanks for taking the time to read through all of this, and hope you guys are OK with me putting another pause on BRS. I'll see you for the next one! :D

Hey guys!

For April the final part of Dosero is completed, some work on the enemy AI was done, and I started implementing what I feel is a more sustainable schedule of working on these side projects since I don't have the means the work on them full-time.

So for Bright Red Skies, the shooting range area has been made so the layout of Dosero is now completed! The area has a spot where people do target practice a mini command post near one of the entrances.



For the FPS game, all of the work done was on the enemies. So now the enemies will spawn in semi-random waves as well as have some kind of spawning animation where they materialize. Also, the AI pathing should be better now. I was getting used to how to set up the pathing but now I feel like I have a better understanding especially when dealing with varying heights and enemies colliding paths.





For a little bit more of a personal note, I started to do a new schedule for when I work on these side projects. Before, I would just work on them every day for at least 30 mins to get the ball rolling, but it felt a little stressful sometimes when I would do leisure stuff since I'd always feel like I should be doing sometime productive towards my projects. So I started going with the schedule of waking up a lot earlier and dedicating my morning before my day job to side projects and the time after my job for leisure. It's been a rocky change and I'm getting used to it, but it feels a lot better for me and I see this as being a way to sustainably make games for the long term.

But anyway, that's all I have for this month! Hoping to start getting used to this new schedule and to pop out a bunch of updates! For May the plan is to:

Bright Red Skies

• Figure out what needs to be shown in the first hour, (like important tutorials, key scenes) and begin implementing them.

FPS:

• Have a rough draft of the first level (minus the boss)

Thanks for checking out this devlog you guys! Cya next time :D

Hey there!

For March I mostly worked on getting Dosero up and running again by adding in some characters, updating some town UI, and making the camera improvements in dialogue since the camera angle go reworked from last month. With the FPS project, controller support was added and the weapon menus were implemented.

So for Bright Red Skies, it really felt empty without any NPCs, so I added some NPCs to make it feel more alive. It's been a while since touching the code related to the town, so I did some refactoring to clean up stuff that doesn't exist anymore like the old camera system and updated the minimap to make better sense for a third-person camera.



With the dialogue system, thankfully everything works well so there were no real fixes that I needed to do on that. But I did make an update to how the interaction looks. So I've been playing some Trails of Cold Steel and whenever you talk to a character they have it so it does a little zoom in and focus on who you're talking to. I liked the way that looked so added that in. :p



For the FPS project, I added controller support! It's been a long time since I've used a controller to play an FPS game, so I don't remember that good controls feel like anymore haha. I don't want to spend too much time right now trying to perfect it since there are more critical tasks to do, but adding some aim assist in the future sounds like it would be a good idea.



The final thing I did was update the player menu to include your current weapon info. There needed to be someplace that better explained what each of the stats icons means, so I also added a button that will pop up some more info.



Honestly, this month felt a bit light in terms of the amount of stuff done on these side projects. Don't worry, for some reason, around summertime I always feel like I go turbo mode lol. For April, I want to completely finish Dosero by adding the second zone which is the shooting range/training area. And For the FPS project, I want to have a more complete AI system so that I can have peace of mind that the AI is working well. Specifically:

Bright Red Skies:

• Extension of Dosero, the shooting range area
  
• Fix some minor bugs from the bug list

FPS:

• AI improvements
  
• Come up with a name, for real this time

Thanks to everyone following along and reading these devlogs it really means a lot! See you guys again next month! :D

Hey there!

For February work was done on changing the camera view in BRS and Dosero is being updated to reflect the story better. For the FPS project, reward chests were added, a new enemy type was introduced, and there are now explosions!

So for Bright Red Skies, the camera was updated from being an arrangement of static cameras to being attached to your character directly. This was a relatively quick update to make there were two main reasons for why this was done. The first is because I think it visually looks a lot better seeing everything much closer haha. The second is because it's not a bird's eye view so fewer objects need to get rendered which will be nice for the performance. Running around the new map I'm getting 600-800 fps compared to the ~150 fps on the previous version. The new map isn't fully complete but those numbers are still nice.



As mentioned, Dosero is getting an update, mostly to add a bigger area for the school and command center. The town is pretty small having only five main areas: homes, shop district, school, command center, and a shooting range. Some of the areas still need to be filled out and NPCs need to get added so I want to add those in some time this month.





For the FPS project, I'm also making I added in some reward chests. There are two types of chests right now, a general chest and a weapon crate. The weapon crate gives a weapon as you would expect, and the general chest drops credits, experience, and low-tier items. Someone told me the drops remind them of Kingdom Hearts items and now I can't unsee it, but it's probably just going to stay like that. ;)



The final thing I did for February, was add some turrets and explosions. I want to try and get something out to test as soon as possible, so when I make the enemies they're all the ones you'd see in the early game. Turrets are a pretty good early game enemy since they're immobile, so I went with implementing them. Thought it would be interesting to add some homing missiles to one of the turret variants, so you can see me shooting down some incoming missiles in the clip below:



Think I'm getting closer to a 70/30 split of my free time when balancing the development of these two games. It's been two months of development on the FPS project and I think progress is decent but the 6-month mark is when I'm going to need to evaluate if making two games at the same time is possible and if the FPS game is even worth pursuing further. I'm a big fan of both JRPGs and FPSs so I personally like the idea of an FPS with a sprinkle of JRPG, but we'll see how it goes. For March here's what I'd like to get done:

Bright Red Skies:

• Clean up project, get reacclimated to the code
  
• Finish Dosero, adding in shops and town NPCs

FPS:

• Controller support
  
• Fix some issues with AI pathing
  
• Weapon menu in the player UI
  
• Come up with a name (?!)

Anyways, thanks for making it to the end of the devlog! I'll see you guys again next month! :D

Hey there!

For January I started to work on Bright Red Skies again! I was also working on my other side project which I plan on being my first Steam release. For BRS I worked on setting a framework of the beginning of the story and fleshing out the main characters and the arcs I want them to go through. With this new FPS game, I implemented some of the core gameplay such as basic enemy AI, weak points, item drops/inventory, player menu & equipment UI, and the procedural level generation.

So for Bright Red Skies, there isn't much to show visually, but I really needed to work out the beginning sequence of the story and how the main characters and reoccurring side characters are introduced. There were also some important characters that I felt could've been explored more so I started writing some more information about their backstory and personality. For February hopefully, I have something more tangible to show. Since the rough draft of the beginning sequence is done, I was thinking about reworking the starting town to incorporate some of the important story points, like the school and training area. The game will start while Yarden is still in training so the school portion should be expanded a good amount.

For the FPS project, I was able to get a good amount of work done in building the core features. The enemy AI is pretty basic and should be further developed, but it's functional and allows me to test. In the future, I'd like to expand it so that enemies can work together in a group better to swarm you. Wanted to reward your precision and knowledge of the enemies so I added in weak and strong points, where there will be a damage modifier depending on what part of the enemy you attack. And lastly, on enemy defeat, they will slowly disappear and drop loot.


Another thing I worked on was the inventory and equipment systems, so when that loot is picked up it will be added to your inventory. With the item systems complete, I thought it would be a good idea to work on the player menu and equipment screen UI. For a game still in the prototype stage, I probably spent too much time trying to polish the UI with the tweening movement but I'm happy with the result!


The final thing I worked on was the procedural level generation since this FPS project is a roguelike. So the way it works is that there will be hand-crafted room designs but the enemies and contents of the room will be varied. There will be a set dimension of how big the map will be (working with 5x5 rooms for now), and the level generator will create a layout of connected rooms.


To be honest, I think the distribution of work on the FPS/BRS was more an 85/15 split of the time instead of the 70/30 I was hoping for. I found that since the FPS game is a new project, creating a lot of core systems could be prototyped relatively quickly compared to creating content for BRS and it was more enticing to see the progress. I'll try and fix this for February, especially since I have a better idea of the beginning sequence so I can actually make in-game content.

For BRS I'd like to see if I can:

• Expand the starting town to have a large training area.

For the FPS game, I'd like to work on:

• The AI to get the AI groups to work better
  
• Adding a shop room where you can purchase items/equipment
  
• Loot chests

Thanks again for reading through this devlog, your support really means a lot! I'll see you guys for the next devlog! :D