TBC Log 5/7/2025

    (Abby) I’m so sleepy… oh so sleepy. But the devlog must be written and I must persuade my fingers to type.
    A lot of new people have been joining the TBC devlog discord server recently, mainly from Katie’s old place of employment. Its exciting to see other devs getting into whatever the heck is happening with my work. Our work. Roy’s and I’s and in the future Katie’s work. Oh and Isaac’s too but many people are really into Isaac’s work already. But uh anyway I’m moving and trying to find a more long term place and it’s really exhausting me a bit. Also trying to get my cat to wake me up later in the day to feed her and it has really Not Been Working. In fact it feels like she’s starting to perma-meow earlier and earlier in the morning. The goal as 9 and we’ve moved from 6 to 5:45. So yeah that’s tiring. 3 hours of sleepless, teeth-clenching perma-meow.
    Well whatever that’s the tidbit on the me-stuff so lets get into the TBC-stuff. Okaaay whats in the commits from April… oh I added a fuck-ton of juice. Honestly when I first started my game dev education I found the concept of juice to be sort of rudimentary and manipulative. Like a sort of squeezing out of the dopamine soaked rag of the player’s brain. But as I continue working on TBC I’m re-shifting my perspective on juice so I may deem my every action and decision as holy and profound. I want the contest judges watching the gameplay video to be manipulated into giving TBC the publicity and renown I think it will eventually deserve. And for players, I want TBC to feel the way it feels in my brain. So how does one go about that other than paying attention to detail and using tweening curves and whatnot? A lot of this “juice” has gone into editing the animations and appearances of the action selection menu and post process volume screenspace effects when the player interacts with different elements of TBC’s interface. A lot of this has been me being like “Hey Roy what visual effects should happen when the player does X?” And Roy being like “uh this maybe?” and then me implementing it. For example, when the game pauses, a little ping sound players, the screen colors desaturate, and a muffling filter goes over the currently playing music. In my opinion, its much more clear that everything’s paused now. Thank the lord. But it is yet tested so we shall see if people are still confused when they click the pause button. Otherwise, other than implementing Maya’s voice narration of the campaign information lines, and having Maya say “good job!” in varying tones whenever the player completes a goal, I’ve been working on perfecting the action selection menu interaction. This comes with fading, blurring, moving, dynamic UI shaders… there’s that movie like, The Spiderwick Chronicles, where there’s this ring thing that the protagonist can look through and see all sorts of pixies and fairies and bullshit. And the goal of the TBC action-selection menu is to evoke “i’m looking through a ring to see all sorts of pixies and fairies and bullshit”. Or sort of like looking through binoculars, because everything outside the action selection menu now blurs. So yeah its been fun working on that. Juice takes time. But I’m having a good time of it.

    I’ve been fixing a lot of other small things, like increasing the speed of clicking knobs and moving hands and such, overall ultimately trying to cut down on “UI fatigue,” as Seb called it, where the player gets sick of doing something because of having to go back and forth between a bajillion menus before being able to change the game state according to their own intention. I think a game that has absolutely terrible UI fatigue is Pokemon TCG Pocket, ahaha. I’ve been playing that a lot and there are so many fun, good parts of it, but like… when I can open a new pack, I have to go through a bunch of roundabout menus and each time I move from one menu to the next there’s a Huge UI animation that I can’t skip through that tells me I can open a new pack even though it’s already told me when I opened the app and it says in my pack time resource stuff at the top of the screen that I can open a new pack. So I’m trying to avoid doing that. Otherwise, a lot of the UI is being re-worked to sort of be more consistent and tonally evocative.
    So this is sort of totally unrelated but I had this weird remembrance of this edutainment (surprise! who, me? edutainment?) game I played when I was a kid that has really affected like every single vibe I’ve ever experienced. It’s called Treasure Mountain! and it’s an ip of my favorite edutainment publisher, The Learning Company (previously Brøderbund). The Learning Company has published pretty much every relevant edutainment game you remember if you grew up in the 90s/00s. I’ve raved over Zoombinis, Carmen Sandiego, and Clue Finders plenty of times to my loved ones. But Treasure Mountain!, god, this game is super strange but also awesome. It has those Sierra On-Line style chunky menus with objects on them that you can use in the game but is actually a weird mix of 2D platformer and logic/education puzzle game? Sort of awesome. No idea why I’m mentioning it here but I feel like I had to mention it somewhere.

     It nuzzled its way into my primary mind-space while I was falling asleep next to my girlfriend last night. I mentioned it to her this morning and she was like “okay.” So now its YOUR responsibility to mentally archive this one-off thought of mine. I’m sure it’ll wrap around somewhere in something relevant later but it definitely isn’t anything right now.
    Like god, just look at this image. You’re fucking ascending into heaven, Magic-Beans style.
   
    There’s another game I’ve been trying to remember that I played when I was a kid… the closest thing I can find in reference to it is Return To Dark Castle but I don’t think its that? Its a platformer with a dude that like, does a funky slow flip every time he jumps. Its in a dungeon/castle, and there are angry eyeball monsters sometimes. Its like a nightmarish blurry dream-logic mix of Castlevania, Dark Castle, and Terraria. I played it on the computer lab computer at summer camp at the “local Quaker boarding school”. If you know what it is please tell me because I need to know for some reason.
    Anyway that’s all your getting from me. I’m tired and gonna go take a nap.

   (Roy)Hello all, Roy here! most of this month for me was spent optimizing and tweaking visuals, I have been adjusting the post processing inside the game and it looks much nicer now! punchier colors while not being oversaturated, and some subtle bloom to add that rich glow to mornings and evenings. It was pretty fun dialing in settings that work for both night and day cycles, mornings feel fresh and almost as if there's a haze to it all, and night time is crisp and cool. The Back Country feels more alive than ever now! Along with that we have been tweaking depth of field and other things like dynamic changing effects while interacting with the menus and animals, it's all part of what adds to the 'feel' of the game and makes it more engaging while you explore! So far improving the visuals and feel of the Game have been a rewarding experience, Just like making a piece of art, the polishing stage is something I always take my time with refining and illuminating what good is there already! On that note, the wolf and pig models have been redone! for the longest time Abby was using an animal asset pack which -- while serviceable, especially with starting up a game, kind of have a creepy/dopey look to them (which was a bit charming to me haha). She asked me to remake the models, and now they look a lot nicer -- not to toot my own horn too much. I started with a sculpt of both heads and with real animal references nearby I think I ended up with more compelling animal faces with some added features as well, they can now be way more expressive! The Croc is mostly perfect as is lol, though I did throw some physical eyeballs on the model, cuz... otherwise its just a flat disk with an eye texture crudely drawn on... The wolf model was what I tackled first and it was equally as fun as it was a challenge, I don't have too much experience with sculpting/modelling animals but I knew I could at least improve on what we were using before, the original wolf model is kind of bizarre the more I look at it... Like it's body is rather elongated, it's snout looks more like a bears, so on and so on and so fourth. What i ended up doing was keeping the original mesh of the wolf with it's rig and I lopped off the head, fixed the neck and other anatomical features. Then got to work sculpting a new head mesh and combined it to the older body, sounds kind of creepy when I put it this way but I can assure you no animals were harmed in the making of TBC! Hahaha. I have also been experimenting with making textures for the animal hides that allow us to colorize them rather easily, giving you more variety, and the tribes more mystery! All in all this has been a fun month for me, creating and refining is my favorite 'gameplay loop' to creating. Feedback and second opinions are like the cheat codes for this kind of creation process lol, and I appreciate all the insight and workshopping Abby has put up with me over lol.