December devlog

[p]Hi! And welcome to my very first devlog![/p][p]I will present you my current goals, the new features developed in December, a quick update on my social media activity, and finally what’s coming next month. Enjoy the read![/p][p][/p][p]The demo! Steam Next Fest starts on February 11, and the public demo needs to be ready for the event. If we subtract the time needed to validate the build… that leaves us with one month! This is a major milestone for the future of the project, and it absolutely can’t be missed.[/p][p][/p][p]The 3Cs and the art direction are now solidly in place. That’s reassuring for the demo and it frees up time for what comes next: level design and all the gameplay building blocks needed to create it, which had been put aside until now.[/p][p]This is therefore what I focused on this month:[/p]

• [p]“Paper” level design: the macro design and progression for the entire demo are finally ready. The demo should last around thirty minutes and will span from the initial tutorial to the discovery of an important event, still secret for now…
  
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• [p]“Interiors”: the character can now enter certain structures, “interior” areas that allow for more variety and greater control over NPC behavior (they can’t move from exterior to interior and vice versa, which lets me limit their movement!). I originally planned to create “instanced” interior zones, but after discussing it with Jérémie (the game’s composer), I came up with the idea of flipping the entire map in real time to switch between interior and exterior views. I’m very happy with the resulting effect!
  
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• [p]Hidden paths: paths that can't be used until they’ve been revealed or “lit up” by a certain species present in the ecosystem. The challenge here was creating a brand-new state for the game’s tiles. There’s still work to do on readability and feedback around this feature (it’s not clear enough yet, in my opinion, how the species “lights up” the paths), but that’s coming soon.
  
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• [p]The level generation tool: a more in-depth article dedicated entirely to this topic is planned for next month, but here is a preview. To create the levels of What Surrounds Us, I use Excel (yes, really!) for obvious speed reasons (imagine manually placing all 2,500 tiles of a level in Unreal!). This Excel/Unreal conversion tool was one of the very first things set up on the project, and it had never really been updated or optimized. That’s now been done: the tool is faster, more optimized, and above all much more convenient to use, finally applying an “alternating” rather than “ordered” tile distribution to perfectly match what’s happening in the engine.
  
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• [p]The custom “sequencer”: yes, I know, I’m reinventing the wheel here. Unreal’s sequencer is very powerful, but it’s not particularly well suited to my game. Character models aren’t really models (just textures applied to tiles), animations aren’t really animations either (only tile rotations), and so on. As a result, the sequencer isn’t always appropriate or easy to use in WSU’s specific case. I decided to script one that’s better suited to my needs, but the task is quite complex and the result is still far from what I’m aiming for. This is a major piece of work that will continue next month, and probably until the end of production.[/p]

[p][/p][p]This month marked the launch of all my social channels. There’s been a lot of experimentation with formats and types of content, and so far the results have been fairly modest. Feel free to follow me on my social networks to see more regular updates on the game’s progress:[/p]

• [p]LinkedIn: a blog post about the relationship between environmental observation and game design in the development of What Surrounds Us[/p]
• [p]Instagram / TikTok / YouTube:[/p]
  • [p]Monthly recap reel[/p]
  • [p]Lore reel: focus on a species inhabiting the game’s first ecosystem[/p]
  • [p]“How it started vs. how it’s going”: how the art direction evolved[/p]
  • [p]Reel: Just make it exist first… you can make it good later[/p]

[p][/p][p]I’m continuing work on the demo! The goal is to run a few playtests early in the month in order to adjust my trajectory and focus on the most problematic areas.[/p][p]If you’d like to support the development of What Surrounds Us, please consider wishlisting the game on Steam, nothing matters more for indie developers!
[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]Have a nice holiday season, take care of yourselves and your loved ones, and I’ll see you again next month![/p]