TBC Log 1/7/2025

(Abby) Hello there TBC information followers, welcome to your December 2024 devlog.

My December was filled with new faces and lots of lights. And then lots of coding TBC. And lots of talking with Roy as he methodically churns out various “actionObject” models.

What’s new with TBC, then?

Well, we sort of went through a big list, such a list is actually just looking at my and Roy’s commit history comments.

Ah, this commit from December 3rd seems to tell me I was “implementing the wolf den”, which is potentially one of the silliest things i’ve intentionally done so far while making this game. All the creatures sleep in a different fashion. The pigs sleep next to one another, with pigs number 11 and 12 sleeping on top of the rest. The wolves stack on top of one another to sleep. The crocs make sort of a star medallion shape and are obviously colliding into one another when they sleep. Here are some of the absurd pictures Roy and I have gotten of such existences.

And now for the freaky ones:

Like I knew TBC was going to be a strange game but Roy’s really helping me bring the strangeness out of its little dark idea hole. So have I been doing much more than laughing this month? Probably not.

Here’s another random commit message: “increased crucible text size”. Yeah So I had some playtesting done at my local board game store and I learned that the crucible is hard to read. Not that I didn’t know this from looking at it, but it took some folks actually struggling with it to hammer it into my brain. I guess like, that playtest affected a lot of the rest of the month for me. It was both exciting to see people interacting with the game, but it was sort of dis-heartening because of the tutorial not being finished and the people being like, “is there anything else?” When the answer is like… ideally… yes. But I DID learn that people are intrigued by the puzzles of TBC and learning more about the world, which I found very very exciting. Caitlin and I did a lot of game design discussion in relation to the world, specifically in relation to the skill “neurosense.” We determined that neurosense, once and for all, is the cultural skillset the player has, in relation to the animals having religion. We were floating around ideas of how to “introduce” neruosense to the animals, as its how the player is meant to connect with them, but we’ve also been very aware towards attempting to avoid a colonialist perspective when describing such cultural exchange. Like instead of the creature proselytizing to the creatures, its more about a gaining of trust and learning more about the cultural knowledge of the animals, how it fits with that of the player, and then how the two can work together for both the player and creatures to learn more around the world they exist in. Neurosense is required to solve a good amount of the puzzles and it makes strange patterns appear on the skin and fur and scales of the creatures, it glows more intensely the higher level it is for the creature. Neurosense also decays over time, as do all the other skills when they are over level 7, but neurosense decays at any level. This is to emphasize the responsibility of the player to keep up their creatures’ neurosense if they want to be able to communicate with the creatures easily. Neurosense builds when creature suspicion is low and player belief is high, player belief builds over time as creatures do things they like to do. Something important about the world of TBC though: the gods of the creatures are as real as the player and their neurosense. Its up to you, dear reader, to determine what level of spirituality and reality mixing you are comfortable with.

Okay it's time for another commit. “Prepping for showing relationships again”. So the campaign has gotten pretty much as far as: the player knows how to feed/rest/etc basic need stuff with the creatures, they know how to solve puzzles, and the two wolves on either side of “the felled tree” puzzle have been re-united now that such felled tree is properly vertical. So what’s next? Showing the player what’s happening with relationships and whispers (in more depth, in relation to how the creatures feel about one another, the player already knows that creatures' whispers can reflect how they feel about doing different actions). The other thing that needs to be introduced next is reproduction, friendship, and compatibility. So all of these things go along together to create the “showing relationships again”. Its something I've been avoiding programming but is rather simple, honestly.

Yeah honestly I could go through more commits with you all but the short of it is this month has been based around a lot of refactoring and implementing actionObjects as Roy methodically churns them out. I don’t think I personally got as much done programming wise as I have in previous months, but TBC development marches on. Next month will be two years of TBC! It is crazy to think about. It feels like it goes so fast and slow at the same time. its so much closer to what its meant to be than it ever has been, and i know the time sink is because of such, but it feels like this tutorial is lagging forever. That’s probably because I need to de-bug everything i’ve made thats meant to go into the tutorial and it feels like i’m frankenstein-ing it together. Although its definitely more planned out than a frankenstein’d object, but the metaphor still stands.

(Roy) Most of my time has been spent churning out assets and making sure to keep things as optimized as I can - where I can, part of that is curbing out a lot of unnecessary polygons in really dense scanned geometry (take for example, rocks, terrain pieces, trees), and in some cases replacing the bulk of mesh's topology with lookalikes that have baked normal maps, to give the illusion of depth from further away, where polygons would make negligible visual difference and if anything a hit to performance! so far it's been a good learning experience with recreating objects with "fakes" and utilizing LODs for seamless visuals no matter how near or far the player may be.

Keeping in with Abby's Commits, this one is great; "lots of material fixes ig" a combination of me learning how unreal handle's materials (coming from my blender knowledge I've learned the hard way that unreal has it's own particular wants and needs for materials to look similar to what I make inside blender) and us fixing random material instances that were looking rather weird.

Another one; "Fixed wolf nest origin" lol, another thing I've been learning is a specific workflow for game engines, having to make sure that within blender every part of the mesh is 'facing' the correct way, referred to as normals, within blender I have to apply all the changes I made to an object's transformation, to account for any normals that may not show up as incorrect until after I import into Unreal, leading to some places/faces/parts to objects showing up as invisible, conversely I need to apply changes with regards to location, when I work I may have multiple objects in one scene from within blender, but I wouldn't want one object to be miles down the road so to speak and have myself or Abby searching for the object itself to rein it back in haha.