Progress Journal
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Progress Media:
Dialogue System Experimentation
Hello all reading this! This is a site I plan to update weekly as I continue work on my project May Our Paths Cross! I’m excited to showcase the work I’ve completed so far, as well as keep all updated on the weekly progress going forward! Over the last 5 months, I’ve slowly been developing the concept and mechanics for the game, and while I want to show as much as possible about the development cycle, certain documents will remain discrete until the full release of the project. As for now, linked above are demos of the gameplay so far, sprite work completed, and other images from development.
As for more specific details, the project is being made in Unreal 5.4.4, as I began working on the framework and a demo all the way in November of 2024! As I firmed up the story details and got things functioning, I started to add a few art assets as visualization materials. While the gameplay system is very basic, it takes after the Serenoa’s Conviction system from Triangle Strategy, a game that was also built using Unreal Engine and possesses the same graphical style. The overall story has also been roughly written out, with some story beats subject to change throughout the creative process, but to have a feel for the characters, links to the character sheets can be seen above!
The gameplay mechanics are nearly fleshed out, with bug fixes here and there to polish the game further, but the biggest next step going forward is implementation! Creating and texturing 3d assets, making 2d pixel sprites, and copying dialogue into the game will consist of the bulk of my work across the next few months, so stay tuned for more!
Signing off-
Ryan
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Progress Media:
Hello Paths Pack! (I’ll come up with a better name…)
This week’s progress was spent creating and implementing the first area’s environment, specifically as a test run to see how long future implementation would take. The bulk of the week was taken up by modeling and texturing the environment and furnishings for the prologue area, with time spent towards the back half of the week on implementing the environment’s collision and ensuring the player character properly interacts with the environment. The biggest challenge faced this week was implementing collision, as due to the environment being a large singular model, generating convex collision in Unreal Engine was out of the question, yielding results that wouldn’t allow for player participation in the environment. Going forward, I plan to make more separate assets to prevent this issue from occurring again. I also plan to update lighting, as getting something visible was the goal for this week, but future weeks will see proper lighting to create a truly complete scene.
What tasks await this week? Cutscenes! I’ve fleshed out the system to work in both the beginning and end of a level, but haven’t created meaningful dialogue and interactions yet. This week will prove a challenge to finish these parts, and have a vertical slice of the prologue complete. After that, it’s onwards to Act I, where the player will explore Vincent’s youth through a playground, and I will figure out how hard it is to create 3 different paths to explore…
Signing off until next time-
Ryan
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Progress Media:
Hello Pathwalkers!
This week’s work focused on completing the cutscenes in the prologue area, as well as making some adjustments to props and appearance. A piece of feedback I had received was regarding contrast, so I adjusted the coloration of the walls to provide better contrast between the characters and environment. As for the bulk of the work, the cutscenes, much of the process was creating events within the Unreal sequencer to prompt sound effects, dialogue, and animations. In terms of dialogue, a piece of feedback I had received from last week was to make sure every instance of text possessed a letter-by-letter appearance style (akin to Undertale), and on top of that, I also updated cutscene dialogue to produce different tones for speaking (akin to the Ace Attorney series). After getting that sorted out, I created the cutscenes, which took longer than I anticipated, being an extra 1 ½ hours of time, but found that I was content with the result.
We’ve reached our first milestone, and I’m excited to share Act 1’s location and story soon. While cutscenes proved to be more difficult than I had originally thought, I am optimistic now that I know the process and can prepare for the next few weeks’ work going forward. I’ve started on Act 1’s sprites, as well as a few other characters, so I’ll share that among other things in my next update!
Signing off until next time-
Ryan
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Progress Media:
Hello Pathfinders,
This week’s work lay in creating Act 1’s artwork, ranging from 3d models to all character movement sprites. The overall work this week took longer than I had anticipated, but nevertheless, I was able to create all that I planned on while also encountering some new ideas and challenges. The biggest challenge, which I am still building solutions to solve is solving how I want to present the edge of the world, as the environment I’ve created is self-contained, and there needs to be a reality beyond it. To remedy this, I’ve been looking into post-process effects on top of creating some background assets to supplement the overall appearance. I have currently implemented a rough idea of how I want it to look, but am very open to feedback. Heading into next week, I plan to take what I have so far to give the scene life, adding cutscenes and NPC characters with dialogue and interaction prompts to change the player’s values.
In the 24 hours since I wrote what you see above, I’ve experimented a bit more with some concepts, leading to some new post-process effects and appearances. I’ve achieved a unique effect that I will continue to develop over time, but now, I want to shift my focus over to developing some story beats for the next week.
Signing off until next time,
Ryan
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Progress Media:
Hello Pathfinders,
This week’s work was building out Act I’s cutscenes, as the bulk of the content is hidden behind that for the level. Across roughly 8 ½ hours, I created cutscenes for the introduction, and each individual route depending on the player’s responses in the overworld. The biggest challenge was choosing how to set each scene up differently from one another, as with multiple routes in the story, having the player be rewarded for trying different things is critical. Each route takes place in a different part of the area, with the autonomy route on the playground itself, the felicity route on a bench by the big tree, and the sincerity route by the school building. While the cutscenes I created are not finalized, I am happy with the overall progress I was able to make this week and feel confident with the first half of the game playable.
With the first Act complete, there is enough content for a demo I hope to release in the next few weeks! For now, you may view the cutscenes for Act I at the link at the top of the page! I plan on improving some minor details over the next week on the Prologue and Act I, while beginning the visualization and content process for Act II!
Until we next cross paths,
Ryan
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Hello pathfinders,
This week’s update is shorter than normal, as the bulk of work I performed went into building out a presentation for the project which I presented to faculty at UConn. I received some beneficial feedback which I’m now looking at how to apply. Next week we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program, so I hope you’ll tune in again then!
Until our paths cross again,
Ryan
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Progress Media:
Hello Pathfinders,
Apologies for the delayed update!
This week, I was able to get the ball rolling on Act II’s content across the board. While this is a combination of the last 2 weeks of work, this week mainly focused on 3d modeling and texturing, as well as the beginning of implementation. Act II is unique from the areas developed so far, as it possesses both an interior and exterior, meaning double the work! I decided to take the approach of smaller areas, with more NPC dialogue and interactions to compensate for it. While I initially planned to work solely on the environment, burnout began to catch up with me, and I decided to implement some assets as well to diversify my work for the week. This led to adding a snow niagara system to create a more cohesive environment. Meanwhile, last week’s work primarily consisted of sprite work as well as script work, where I have a rough draft that will be edited as I continue to work with the cutscenes. As for character sprites, deciding color palettes was critical, as trying to ensure that each character is distinct was important, as well as correlated to the general game concepts, like important character colors. Going into next week, I plan to continue implementation, as well as begin work on cutscenes, a process that will occur over the next two weeks.
Look forward to seeing a complete act II in a few weeks!
Until our paths cross,
Ryan
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Progress Media:
There will be no videos from this week, as I plan to release a larger video next week displaying all cutscenes together. Stay tuned!Hello Pathfinders,
With cutscene work split between this week and the next, I had the opportunity to work on polish alongside some brand-new content! The first step was beginning to play with post-processing filters to add bloom and DOF to my levels, which allowed for a more professional feel, albeit one that I still am tinkering with. The other major artistic innovation of the week was creating pixel art normal maps for my repeating textures through an Aseprite plugin, linked below. After completing some artistic polish, I finished updating and implementing Act II’s assets. The main struggle with Act II is the 2 environments, as having both an interior and exterior makes the process more complicated in terms of both collision and loading assets. I’ve encountered some bugs with Unreal’s level streaming system, but plan to troubleshoot across the next week, as I built in bugfix/playtest time. After all the implementation, I’ve reached the point where I can now start cutscene work, of which I finished the introduction and Felicity route, albeit, needing some more sprites, which I plan to create after the base game’s content is complete.
Looking to the next week, polish and cutscenes are the name of the game! The other major component left is finishing the script of Act III, to provide a conclusion that takes the ideals of each route, and exemplifies them in a satisfactory conclusion. Looking forward to sharing that soon!
Until Our Paths Cross Again,
Ryan
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Progress Media:
Hello Pathfinders,
This week’s progress consisted of finishing the rough draft of Act II! All cutscenes all fully functional, and from there, testing a build was the next step. Having completed the same process with the prologue and Act I, there were very few hiccups, as I’ve learned techniques to make the process go smoothly. The major areas to improve on these cutscenes are sprites clipping into the floor, adding more emotion sprites, and a lag to load for the Sincerity cutscene. After I had created the rough version of Act II, I began the script for Act III, which I have a draft of, but will definitely be tweaked as I go along to ensure the final product is the best it can be! As for next steps, I’m looking to begin modeling each scene for the final act, as well as creating character sprites. I have some technically ambitious ideas, such as playable sprite switching, and scene loading, so as I work, I’ll see what will be feasible within the timeframe.
As the project begins to take form, I’m very happy to see it come to fruition as I envisioned. I’m looking forward to sharing a playable version of the game publicly, but until then, I hope you’ll stay posted for more!
Until our paths cross again,
Ryan
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Hello Pathfinders,
These last two weeks have consisted of lots of art. And by lots of art, I mean A LOT. Act III varies from the others in that it takes place across three different environments as opposed to one, meaning triple the work! Nevertheless, I’ve found ways to balance the workload, such as reducing NPC interactions to simply objects around rooms, allowing for some environmental storytelling. Most of Act III’s assets have been roughly textured and modelled, and while I plan to update the designs over time, I wanted something in place for now to be able to finish off the cutscenes. Next week’s work will consist of flipping these assets and implementing them in game, as while sprite implementation is straightforward, model implementation runs into collision difficulties. At the end of next week, I plan to have playable environments, and begin with navigating other technical difficulties I may run into, such as level loading and sprite swapping. While I won’t share any images yet, next week will be a full reveal of Act III’s environments in a playable capacity, so I hope you’ll look forward to it.
Until Our Paths Cross Again,
Ryan
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Progress Media:
Hello Pathfinders,
This week consisted of technical work, mainly in the form of implementation of 3d assets and sprites and reprogramming some functionality of NPCs and player character sprites. While my original plan had been to just focus on implementation this week, I decided I would save some implementation for the next 2 weeks, as instead I wanted to ensure that some game systems were running as intended. With Act III allowing for a more immersive experience for Vincent, being that he is present in the world and not a spectator, I had to create the ability to change the player's sprite in all three different environments.
This was a straightforward task, as I created new player controllers that are switched out via game modes, but found that once I implemented these, I could no longer interact with NPCs. This was due to a coding dependency where the NPCs would only look for a specific player character blueprint, and I was able to resolve this by setting up the entities to search for any “player” by specifying multiple classes to look at. In the process of updating the NPCs, I decided to fix a bug that had been problematic for the last few weeks, NPCs popping up and down randomly. I set all the NPCs to be stationary, and with that reprogramming, they all function as intended now, which is quite a relief.
Getting to start on the last pieces of content is exhilarating! The next two weeks will consist of cutscene creation and playtesting, ensuring that a player can experience the game start to finish with minimal/no issues. I’m excited to share a rough build of the game next month, and am looking forward to receiving feedback before the final product becomes available!
Until our paths cross,
Ryan
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Hello Pathfinders!
Apologies for the lack of correspondence as of late, I’ve been very busy preparing the current state of the project. That state is…
A build is going public! (Click Here to Play!)
Video for those not on Windows
You heard that right, while not the most polished product, a playable version of the progress so far is now available on my site! If you’re reading this in the future, it likely isn’t on the homepage anymore, but should be preserved here. I have mostly focused on finishing off 85% of the content, with the only remaining piece of the puzzle being the epilogue, which will have answers as to the mysterious hooded man’s identity and occupation…
Other than the playable project, the majority of the work has been on polish and documentation, making sure that proper items are publicly available to view, such as gameplay and an executable file of the current demo. I will be exhibiting the project with several other peer projects next week, and look to get more feedback as we get closer to completing the game!
Until Our Paths Cross,
Ryan