TBC Log 9/9/2025

    (Abby) Last month was a combination of a bunch of things, a continuation of the design climb we’ve been taking to try and make TBC like… just generally better, and then the attempt to prep for this local showcased called CIGS, which stands for Chicago Indie City Games Showcase. I contributed a chunk of money to CIGS for its kickstarter fund, not really to promote advertising for TBC, although we tried to do that a little, but mainly because I want to see the local Chicago scene grow and I think this is probably the primary avenue for such a thing happening effectively, as the discord server for ICG has over 1000 members and lots of activity. Its run by my friend Seb, who I wanted to support as well.
    We did end up spending the last chunk of last month prepping for CIGS, primarily… Katie set up a website, Roy made a trailer for TBC and some prototypes for our business cards, and I worked with a graphic designer named Alesya, the girlfriend of my close childhood friend Max, to design some business cards for Dark Meadow that have a QR code that links to the TBC steam page. She’s worked on some interesting stuff before… including the art for Cut The Rope and was one of the initial bitmoji designers.

    As pictured above, the business card ended up looking cool. I think Alesya designing this has given us a good footing to bounce off of in the continued visual identity of Dark Meadow separate from TBC. Although, this isn’t super duper important, other than for like, branding? But who cares about a brand in relation to video-games? People want fun out of a game, not to be sold a inflated sense-of-self. So I’m balancing in my brain my desire to min-max the vibes of the company and actually “get the game out the door” (my father keeps repeating this phrase in our weekly calls, to my dismay. Who needs shareholders when you have filial piety?).
    This business card was primarily to act as a catch-all for Dark Meadow info in relation to TBC, as we were showing the two games pictured on it “Plumix-Pedia” and “As Metric” as a form of like, “this is what we’ve done before in much less time… you should check out the thing we’ve spent orders of magnitude more time on that’s coming up at Some Point!
    It was cool to watch people play the our games, though, as it reminded me that like… people do like the things I make and get a lot out of them, and find them sort of special. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a good amount of people play my games, like the last time I saw this I was in college. So it was like, “ah, this is what it’s all for.” People were really into Plumix-Pedia which makes me think maybe at some point in the future we should expand upon it and put her up on steam.     
    Otherwise, we've been doing a lot of game design on TBC this month. I’m not gonna go too hard into that because like… we’ve been going over a lot of stuff in a general, fast way. I think I’ll cover each system as we work on them in the future for the sake of not writing this devlog forever. All I’ll say is today we went over everything we’ve re-designed and are gonna start making an implementation roadmap, and that roadmap doesn’t seem as scary as I thought it would so… nice?


    (Roy) Hey all, I was deep in the trenches of design this month. Figuring out a cohesive style for these technologies the Hag has made and iterating on/redesigning the current "doodads", chief among them is the Crucible. a very important device for navigating around with the animals you're observing, being able to pick from a tribe and then cycle through the animals in the selected tribe is key. After coming up with a few sketches and getting feedback from Abby and cementing those ideas into the device. I introduce to you the crucible's new design...
 
    Instead of a row of buttons atop the device its a single knob for each function, rotating tribes, and rotating names. It feels way more natural to me than a row of buttons, because things (as they often do) might change, having a more adaptive method of navigation is a good thing in this case. I also was tinkering with the designs of the Doodads to better represent the 2d menu interfaces we're slowly figuring out-- but rest assured that it's surely. Side note; I enjoyed making the little sprites for the display, was surprisingly more fun that I thought it would be. I've made an LCD shader before that simulated Dot matrix Displays, RGB LED, and some other stuff like color dot CRT stuff. So this wasn't so hard but then I realized I can just make it an image texture and not have to worry about more complex shaders (and conseqeuntly, more shader instructions which add to performance draws). I'm gonna need to touch up the sprites a tiny bit but I still really like this wolf icon.

 
    Another big thing this month was getting some designs and a trailer finished for CIGS (Chicago Indie Game Showcase) as Dark Meadow would be there. And so I made some business cards, but also a Trailer for the steam page! I will admit that neither are my area of expertise, but I think I did... well, it looks servicable at the very least. Its something I want to return to later when we have more of the game visually represented, and I learn more of Unreal Engine's setup required to record specific things inside the game whether that be specific gameplay moments or cinematic shots. Regardless, I'm happy I was able to make something that was better than "placeholder" at the very least.


    (Katie) This month I took a pivot into something relatively new for me: web dev! We needed a company website and I did take a class covering some of this in college so I figured I could make something functional. And, thanks to some starter code from Gen and W3Schools tutorials, I did!
    We have all the essentials: a link to these dev logs, bios of the devs with a cute (public domain) photo of an animal that represents them, a page for each of our games, and our social media. 
    We'll probably work with a dedicated web designer at some point but until then, Roy and I settled on a general dark, nature-y theme to match the company's branding. There's definitely a lot that could be polished and re-designed (especially the mobile site, it sure is functional) but for now we have a good place for basic info and to start marketing from! It was fun to be able to point people to somewhere official when we were at CIGS.   
    Beyond the HTML and CSS (which I mostly understand, though getting elements perfectly aligned is still a challenge), I learned that there's a whole lot more to getting your website to work. You need hosting, you need to get your DNS in order, you need to think about security and traffic, you need your SSL.. Thankfully since we're still a good ways away from the launch of The Back Country I can leave these at "functional and good enough" but eventually these systems will be improved. 
    I had a pretty good time at CIGS! It was a very long day (I'll need to work on my stamina for longer conventions) but it was great to see people enjoying the games. It's also fun to feel like a part of the Chicago indie community! There were so many cool projects shown so you should definitely check all of them out and support some local devs.

    I also got to go on vacation! Woo! What a month. I'll be back in Unreal Engine in September. We had a lot of design meetings (which I'm sure other people mentioned in their updates) so it'll be back to gameplay implementation soon.

    (Carrie) Carrie’s CIGsLog
    CIGs was my first games festival! Very exciting. Special shout out to Jonah, who let us use his phone as a wifi hotspot to run Plumix Pedia.
    CIGs made me realize that I really don’t talk to very many people day to day at this point in my life. That sort of thing ebbs and flows.
    I got a cool t-shirt from CIGs, too! Featuring Roy’s sick hog drawing.
    We also threw around more marketing ideas, including block print posters and advertisements. TBD with all that!