TBC Log 4/15/2025

    (Abby) I almost didn't write this. This is because in the month of March I was preparing The Back Country very intensely to be submitted to Indiecade. I have been working with a fellow game developer in Chicago who goes by the name of Seb Galvez to submit this application. Seb has been doing some writing for the application. Obviously more than just Seb and I have been working to prepare The Back Country for this submission. These more than just Seb people include Roy, Isaac, and Carrie as well. Along with preparing for this submission I’ve been taking steps to grow Dark Meadow. I am hiring my first full-time employee. Her name is Katie, she is one of my close friends in Chicago. She currently works for Jackbox. She has gotten somewhat well fed in relation to her Jackbox experience and has been looking to move on elsewhere. I needed a programmer she's a programmer. We've worked well together in the past and we're hoping to work well together in the future. So I’ve been getting her prepped and ready as a full-time employee. I've been doing all sorts of business bullshit that I, as a young child, never even assumed existed in this form of reality. This includes writing up contracts, establishing payroll, working with a lawyer, getting healthcare, and understanding what a 401(k) is. And then also I'm going to employee myself, paying myself, as CEO, minimum wage in Illinois. Emmet (previously Emitt), Katie's boyfriend, says that I should buy a boat with my new influx. I had to sign a contract with myself addressed to me and given warmly from me. It all felt absurd. But I guess I'm a real business owner now. I guess I have been an owner for the past year, at least since I've been employing Isaac and Roy as contractors. But now it feels a bit more legit. I'm using payroll software. I know what a 401(k) theoretically is. Anyway, back to the game development side. You don't wanna hear about finance. You're not on itch.io just to read about finance. You’re here for a wild gamer ride.
    With Katie, I’m planning on having her start implementing some rather intensive features. These features include… multiplayer! And character customization through uploading 3D models on the side of the player! And Steam integration! Which is probably not that complicated through UE5, but on our new github project I’ve tagged this task as “Guts”, which means its a task that scares me. I know the only way to stop being scared by something is to take it head-on, but I've been taking all sorts of bullshit game dev stuff head-on for the past three years straight and… I would love a break. The headbutts hurt a bit these days. I guess that’s why I’m trying to expand Dark Meadow, so I can start dedicating most of my time to writing out Game Design Documents while other people do more implementation. I mean, I love making games. If I didn’t love the physical making part of it I don’t think it should be what I do every day. But I’m realizing I have a lot of ideas that I need to write down and flesh out. My own process of automating Dark Meadow sort of mirrors the design ethos of having the player perpetually automate the world of TBC in the singleplayer campaign, in relation to The Eternal Dance.
    I was gone for a week of March. I needed a vacation real bad so I drove to Vermont, my cat Lulav in tow in the passenger seat (don’t be a narc to the car rental agency). We got to see Niagara Falls, to visit my friend Maya Ben-David, to see Roy in Ohio, and I got to learn how to snowboard. It was exactly what I needed: to get out of the city and enjoy the connections i’d been building the previous year. I met up in Vermont with my two friends from the Game Center, Miles and Santiago. Shout out to them for being so gung-ho at such a last minute’s notice. We had a lot of fun. I found this weird board game called Trismegistus at the local board game shop while waiting to pick them up at the train station. It had an illustration of a weird old wizard man on the front with his black cat companion. I searched it up on board game geek, it had a decent enough rating, so I thought to buy it. When I brought it to the clerk, he swore he’d never seen it before in his life. I thought this was even more reason to buy it. It is a game about using “alchemy” to transmute lead into gold with the philosopher’s stone. You can play as Isaac Newtown or Cornelius Agrippa or other random scientist-philosopher types throughout history. Perfect, right? Apparently the dev is problematic, though, so don’t buy it. Just borrow my copy. Anyway, while I was gone, I tasked Roy with making models in relation to all the game’s puzzles. There wasn’t a ton of direction for him, other than brief descriptions of the concepts of the puzzles in a spreadsheet, and then me being like “whatever you think is related to this puzzle, make a model around that and we’ll figure it out later.” So Roy was consistently sending me tons of models throughout this week, I didn’t look at them until the end. He really pulled spectacular 3D concepts from seemingly thin air. Roy is a bit of a god-send. It really helped continuing the creative drive of TBC without me being there. It gave me some confidence in the concept of perpetuating Dark Meadow’s output without me, again, a goal that mirrors the campaign progression of TBC and my life goals in general. I mainly want to automate Dark Meadow’s output so I can take some time off to get a PHD and continue to have people develop the games I’ve written detailed game design documents for while I’m studying. The games I’m planning on fleshing out to be perpetuated somewhat in my absence: Centrifuge, The Suggestion, Liver Lung Battle Brawler, Skyway Joe, My Friend’s Basement.
    Other things we did in March: I spent a lot of time with Roy trying to update the various UI aspects of TBC, specifically in relation to the Action Selection menu. Seb said that updating that would be somewhat vital for the submission, because so much of the game revolves around its interaction. Roy and I spent a good amount of time programming The Perfect Shader for the Action Selection menu that has slight animation and is also subtle and pretty and fun. So that’s what we did, at the end of March and bleeding into the beginning of April. Next month’s dev log will go a bit more into the juice I implemented along with Roy’s designs.

    I wrote a bunch of voice lines for my friend Maya Ben-David to narrate as the tutorial instructions. I spent a lot of time going through them, making sure they made sense and would be good to use as comprehensible vocal tutorialization commands for the Indiecade submission. I put them all in a spreadsheet after cleaning up the writing in the CampaignManager class. Lots of updates to the CampaignManager happened in the beginning of April in relation to this, specifically in terms of timing tutorial progression in relation to the time of Maya’s voice line.
    A lot of time in March was spent prepping the campaign to be investigated for bugs by Carrie Padula, our QA tester. So there was a lot of going back and forth between me and her every time there was a bug. This was all for the sake of delivering a build of TBC to VM that could be played all the way through. Guess what… we managed to do that! Still have to meet with VM to go over some of her feedback, but otherwise we are cruising on that aspect.
    Otherwise, the beginning of the month was mainly bug fixing and the middle was vacation and Roy’s spectacular model Event and the end was bug fixing and some fun UI. See ya next month!

    (Roy) Hello all, Roy here! Most of this month's work for me was creating Puzzle assets, lots of fun and unusual spots for animals to do a variety of things at! To be honest it was challenging at times to think about how some of these places would look like, when described to me. But I am quite happy with how they turned out, my favorite (for some reason) is the tiny Carnival tents that are next to the animal nests, they look really cute being that tiny and also are an immediate eye-catcher the moment you see em'.
    Been trying to retool my workflow to make the process of asset stages much easier on me, it also impacts how a building object will look going from stage 1 to the next, and so on. Being able to see what they all look like in one scene really helps me to keep things consistent!

    I have been learning a lot of techniques over the time I've been working with Abby on TBC, transitioning from purposefully low-poly models and low resolution textures to stuff that is higher quality in both regards, having to actually optimize these things has been a fun challenge, and second nature at this point. as time goes on I feel that my skills have been improving whilst working in The Back Country, yet another reason why it feels so rewarding!

    (Isaac) I’ve mostly been working on UI sounds to make the player's experience with the interface feel satisfying and tactile. Clicking buttons! Turning knobs! Rubbing orbs! Love a good orb. A little bit can go a long way toward making the gameplay feel less abstract and more embodied.

    (Carrie) Carrie’s TestLog

    I got to test the first full build of TBC this past week - very exciting! The music is great. I tested through tutorial completion on my Lenovo ThinkPad and I am glad to say that it ran smoothly. There were a few bugs, which is good for me. I always like when there are bugs in software because then I get to write bug reports, which is one of my favorite things to do. I like the process of breaking down things step-by-step to get specific results. It’s like lab work, but without any gross bullshit like taking derivatives or trying to measure gravity. In other words, fun! There was one weird one which happened to me, and to one of the other people on the team but I forget who, but wouldn’t happen on Abby’s computer for some reason. It’s fixed now - I’m really impressed with Abby and Roy’s quick turnaround on builds. I’ve also been looking into some merch options - so far I’ve found a t-shirt company based in Chicago that isn’t evil! I’m excited to work with them. The not-evil production part is turning out to be the trickiest part of merch. I’m thinking that it would be very cool to make miniatures of some of the parts of the game’s set, like little PDF instructions on how to make them, perhaps? Maybe someone would like that. We shall see.