TBC Log 6/4/2025

    (Abby) Hello interactive media interactors. It is I, Abby Yaffe. This month has been a bit of a haze. I think most of my brain has been going to onboarding Katie and also looking for a new place to live. Fun fact: I’ve found a pretty cool new place to live. My girlfriend even approves of it, and she has not approved of previous places I’ve looked at, so I’m vibing. Have been on so many condo tours. Blech. But we are Probably Finished Looking. Katie only has a say in where I live because its also going to be her office.    
   You’d never guess what I’ve been working on. It rhymes with Baction Belection Benu… the Action Selection Menu! I fucking hate this thing! It literally has infinite bugs, it will never not have bugs. I need to write out like an entire fucking narrative schematic for its behaviour or something, but I probably won’t. Recently, specifically what I’ve been doing with it: fixing yellow flickering player “click me!” signification bugs. There are still bugs I need to fix in relation to actions not stopping flickering for one creature when said action is previously selected for another creature. Idk its a whole thing. I just need to take some time to write down all the ways I want it to work where it isn’t currently working but I just don’t have the fucks to give about it right now. Hopefully some day the fucks to give will return and the world will be at peace.
    I also this month implemented the new CreatureInfoPanel UI. We were trying to make it look brain-y, as it only appears when the player is zoomed in and the vignette is strong. We want it to feel like a UI element where the player is looking at information on the inside of their brain, as they are only accessing this information through psychic means. It needs a bit more work but is good for now, it gets the point and information across.

    The vignette is not showing up in builds and being really annoying. A slight note. I think it has to do with like, the scalability settings of the Post Process Volume being set to very low, so we need to figure out how to override that.
    Oh I got the background blur to work finally. I was using this widget plugin that caused a memory leak for a while so I eventually trashed it and just went with a screenspace PPV shader. I should’ve done this first but I avoided it for some reason, I probably thought that it’d be more simple without shaders. But what I’m learning with game dev is that using shaders is almost always more simple than any cpu-bound methodology involving UI elements, if you have the half-decade spanning mastery over them that I’ve accumulated(yes, very humble of me, I know). The only thing thats sort of annoying with them is like, basic conversions of coordinates from UI space to world space to screen space and such, as it isn’t always simple. It can be hard to tell what measurement a coordinate is actually from, so then when you try to create a conversion function for it, it can be slightly wrong and hard to tell why. But success with this, I guess, comes from a strong knowledge of the engine’s fundamental ways of how it thinks about itself. I’ve considered that instead of just having a blur effect, maybe also having a glassy twist effect, similar to the Balatro menu screen look. I got like, halfway there, but had to focus on other stuff and left it for later.
     I hooked up Roy’s cloud light function, which honestly looks so freaking cool.
    The last thing I did was like, create a debug menu for starting at different points of the campaign in-game. This is because, now that Katie is working with me, I don’t want to be constantly changing the campaignManager file for temporary purposes. I want to only change it for permanent reasons, like to fix typos or progression, not to change where I’m testing the campaign from. I made a debug menu at the start of the game for this, and it had some bugs, but Katie fixed them. It was so awesome to not be the one who needed to fix the bugs. It was so awesome.

    Other than explicit dev, I’ve been continuing to polish the Indiecade submission stuff with Seb. I got some feedback from my girlfriend, who has done some similar contest writing stuff in the past, and still need to go over that with her, but I feel like we are maybe sort of okay? Idk. I have no idea what is expected from this, and i have a sour feeling that maybe we won’t get in, but I don’t have the like explicit feeling of “this will fail.” I think the sour feeling is there to not get too excited and then disappointed, it’s a feeling I’ve sort of trained into myself. Maybe that’s sort of defeatist but I see it more as being realistic. If anything, I’ve been using the Indiecade deadline as a sprint deadline, so that’s been worth it. I’m sure it’ll be fine, I think I’m just tired.
    Speaking of Seb, their organization, Indie City Games, has launched a Kickstarter, and it’s going super successfully! Dark Meadow has given them a good chunk of cash, and you should too! They’re one of the coolest indie games organizations i’ve ever seen or been part of, and is a core part of the Chicago indie games community. Everything they do is so fun and community-centric, and I trust Seb with all my heart to be an amazing leader. I love like, that there’s an organization that I love, that I’m part of, that is adjacent to mine, that I don’t have to lead. I love when others are competent. Idk. It warms my heart, to believe in others.
   Oh, I finally figured out how to somewhat explain Level 2 to other people. The remaster of Oblivion is what has helped me. I'll leave you with this little tidbit of revelatory explanation:

   If you don't understand anything about level 2, check out my old dev log here introducing the joke/concept.
   Well, fuck off. Love you. Ttyl.

    (Roy) Hey hey! Most of this month had me working on Misc stuff with Abby. From figuring out how to display puzzles in a more intuitive & mystical way, to tidying up some loose ends and thinking through things, it was a more chill month. Continuing on from last month's remastering animals, I took a crack at the puzzle tree you interact with early on, it looks more lively! and on the subject of trees, I also remade the ones that border the view of the Player! i think adding in moss was the right choice, and it looks nice and murky.
   Further on the subject of remastering, heres a screenshot of one of the puzzle icon drafts I made, you can see the icon before it was just a moon with clouds with it, while serviceable in other UI designs, what we're going for is something more vibe-packed. 

   Speaking of clouds, I was thinking of the lighting in TBC, and at some point i was thinking about shadows being casted from clouds to add some more dynamic feeling lighting than just sunrise and sunset. Within unreal it was quite easy to add a material to the sunlight to add this moving noise pattern overtop it that'll simulate cloud shadows, I think it's quite nice.

   Another thing that was fun was setting up cameras throughout the world to act as like a CCTV cam feed of each item/area to show you their look but also the progress on them.

   Also, I was working with Abby and Carrie on Dark Meadow's Studio logo and other stuff like the Social media design, we all were thinking of something dark, mystical, and artsy, evocative of what we were calling "witchy vibes" haha. We were thinking abt flowers and I had this striking image of a Datura flower in my mind, and it feels so fitting for Dark Meadow's aesthetic, we're still working out the details of the logo(s) itself but I can share some drafts here as Abby permits haha.

   (Katie)I'm excited to be writing my first devlog entry!
   I've been doing what all engineers do in their first weeks of work: spending a lot of time trying to understand the codebase. It's actually pretty readable, especially considering Abby has been coding a complex simulation game in blueprints entirely by herself for two and a half years. Eventually I'll think about some larger refactors (especially once we start thinking about networking, oof), but for now we just want it to be presentable. Our main deadline coming up is our Indiecade video submission (which I assume Abby talked about up top), so I was tasked with playing through the campaign and fixing any bugs that impeded progression.
   In addition to engineering I'm also helping out with some production work. My last job was on very short development cycles, so I have a lot of experience with scheduling tasks, managing deadlines, and working with milestones. Organizing priorities and backlog tasks is actually pretty interesting, and it's been fun to think about how to create structure without introducing bureaucracy and ~meetings~.
   I'm looking forward to implementing some larger features soon!