This is a little devlog I'm doing for "Gigantimus ZX - Love Never Rusts". I've partnered with the composer (Cowberry) of the last game I worked on once again and we brainstormed a bit while the stream was going on. We've centered around a sort of 1980s anime styled game featuring dating sim elements and a mecha third person shooter where you defend a beach town / seaside resort where you do said dating sim elements.

Not quite vapourwave, but more of a specifc city pop aesthetic that we're going for

You control Avergmus trying to win back the affections of Singuliera but the story is actually centered on Damian watching from afar trying to steal information about how to also get Singuliera's affection but rewinding time whenever the player fails. Also Damian has rewinded time so far back that the characters are now on a small japanese island in the 1980s also you have no memory of him. I don't even know if we need that justification but hey, an excuse to have payphones and CD stores.

This one shot in Akira oddly fascinates me. An interior I hope to reproduce with its purple hazey tiles and bulky appliances.

Last year I did some very long commentated dev log videos on "I Saved the World but My Girlfriend Got Turned Into a Sword" . This year I'm just going to record an occasional quick 10 minutes and ramble on about what I've done up to the current point sorta like a live update. As someone with a huge fixation on wanting to cover every last detail (usually with brackets), I'm trying to just hit the main points of what I accomplished and just show the game in its current state incrementally.

So far I recorded 2 devlogs shortly after the stream ended. I'll probably update sporadically on how it goes.

(Btw I'm looking for a 3D artist to help on texture/modeling if anyone wants to collab)

So the music is going to get a huge focus in this project. Me and Cowberry discussed a plethora of options of what a mech game would sound like and we started with rock music, and then to 1980s retro rock like Macross. Then we came to Gundam's Zeta funkadelic tracks and from there we were reminded of the proliferation of songs like Plastic Love which were popular during that time. From there we went on a deep rabbit hole beyond just Mariya Takeuchi. To elaborate a bit more on city pop, it's basically a music genre in Japan that hit its peak in the 80s. It's dreamy, upbeat and optimistic but also funky and tropical. 

This charming optimism was likely inherited by the absolute magnitude of Japan's economy at the time, in the 80s the top 8 banks in the world were all Japanese, (nowadays it's a mix between china, america and some european countries). half the the world traded on the Tokyo Exchange Market,  and 50% of prime real estate in downtown LA was owned by Japanese investors.  When Cyberpunk was  implying that Japan culture would take over the world, it wasn't just some random racist thing it was reflective of real fears of where the world was going (but still kinda racist). The 90s however proved that all wrong, and Japan never quite reached its former glory.

Thing is, although we generally worship 80s as radical and cool, for a long while the Japanese 80s style was seen as tacky and dated by Japanese people. It's since made a huge comeback on Youtube of all places, Mariya Takeuchi came back to shoot a music video for the original song, just recently The Weekend sampled Tomoko Aran's Midnight Pretenders and well, culture runs in cycles I suppose.

This rabbit hole has been really fun to dive into. I legitamately discovered new music I'll be listening to for awhile like. Tell me By The End of Century ain't a banger. Another new favourite of mine is Momoko Kikuchi's Last Runner, and the entire Sea is a Lady album by Toshiki Kadomatsu. Though the weirdest that transports me to another world is Maze by Yuji Toriyama. With all of this inspiration Cowberry has also decided to get some friends to help out with the recording of the music (including a bass player). The prospect of doing an anime opening got her creative juices flowing so we're going all out on this (she's a huge weeb fyi). How will this all culminate in the story and game? Who knows but we're on such a high momentum and my brain is filled with city pop and vibes that the productivity is going well. Though I think a love themed game with robots and mecha will work really well with this musical style. Generally I want the game to be upbeat and reflective of a very pristine atmosphere that you want to protect and live in.

Oh yeah I did another devlog showing off the visual novel-esque dialog box system we got going. There's also a start of a game loop and actual goal condition implemented which I'll get to in the next post.

So I've been tackling the game loop stuff, meaning developing the mechanics that you engage with throughout the entire game. There's now an introduction cutscene that sets up the whole premise (though a bit scant on details and potential characterization, but everythings still placeholder) and I also got some enemies spawning and chasing you with bullets. 

This was the first bump in the road as I didn't really feel like figuring out how to teleport the player and spawn a whole new scene with Damian, there are some logistics to figure out like if I'm going to do anything simular down the line (will the date take place in multiple spots? can there be multiple NPCs in the same scene? will NPCs need to change location mid scene? etc).  I grinded through it though and hacked together some very messy code, but it might be a good idea to clean it up later when I know what everything is going to be for and what needs to be re-used (and what can only be used once). Later on in the project there will be probably a lot of this.

To further re-inforce the groundhog day mechanic I added a Persona like clock in the top left that indicates what time of day it is. When you do significant events like talk to an NPC or take part in a mech battle, time will go forward for x number of minutes. I don't know what the ramifications of this will be other than some events only triggering later and you having to schedule around it, but for now it's just to indicate "Hey you're now 5 minutes before asking Singuilara out, this is how Damian's power works."

As for enemies I ran into a problem where the spawner would spawn an enemy, and then the enemy would spawn a bullet, but then that would cause an infinite loop error and I spent an hour or so not understanding why. Whenever I spawn something in Godot I tend to use owner.add_child(object) I use owner because I want the root scene to be the parent of the enemy or bullet, so that for example the bullet doesn't move with the enemy or the enemy moves with the spawner. What I didn't realize is that objects that are added dynamicly technically don't have an owner (thus a null error). The bullet is trying to be created at the enemy's owner, but there is no actual owner given. So the solution was actually get_parent().add_child(object) since everything has a parent usually. So note to self from now on.

Now I'm mainly going to focus on the rest of the date scenes with Singuilara and hack together something that at least seems complete, then figure out the mech section with the buildings blown up and stuff. Then we'll have a functioning complete video game, hopefully.

So I lied and implemented a few shaders and basic colors to the base scene. However I also realized the groundhog day esque mechanic needed to be further elaborated so that multiple different ways could game over and funnel into the scene that Damian keeps rewinding back to. Now the game properly resets and can remember things that carry over between resets. Here's what I mean: 

Basically from the Damian scene you can branch out and explore the town to prepare properly for the date. You can start the date any time you want but without certain knowledge that Damian aquires from your past failures or triggering certain events the date will eventually reset back to the Damian scene. Every time you do an event or progress the date, time will forward. Enemies will invade the city prompting you to defend it, but if you're in the middle of the date you will just have to let the city take it. The city isn't gauranteed to be destroyed in a single invasion but if you let too many invasions happen while you're in the date then both you and Singuilera will perish. 

So the whole objective of the game is to not only prepare for the date but to make sure the date happens at the right timing. Damian will also let you know when invasions happen the first time you encounter them. I'm wondering if the date could be split into multiple dates as well, like you meet up with Singuilara at certain spots at certain times but that might be complicating it a bit.

I updated with a quick devlog to show how the game works as of now:

Andddd we're doing some character modeling, because I figured I would switch gears and just get a character in the game to also gain some momentum, over the weekend I'll probably sit down and get some actual content in the game, but for now it's easier to just grind out some character models as I don't want them to be too last minute. Time is running out though and my time for working on this is effectively cut in half. Here's another video log to briefly talk about character modeling.

Edit: Also I decided to change the color of Avergmus' face, which movie is this face paint a reference to? It has lots of robots.

I finally got around to modeling and texturing the main character, now 2-3 more to go... I'm probably just gonna double down on the first design and not stray too far with Gigantimus. I used the same shader I've been using since... Train Trip. Which was my first project in Godot and wow only one year ago? Just modified the same shader a lot to get the most mileage out of it. It merely takes two textures and celshades between the two rather than just pure color. You can do some neat stuff like the hair shine disappearing in shadow or eyes glowing in the dark wind waker style. Best of all you get complete control of the colors and can even use it with sprites using Material Overrides.

Managed to test out blinking. Because uhh robots need to liquify their camera eyes too you know.

The dirty secret is to offset the UVs by the percentage of total textures on a sheet. Pretty sure they did this for Megaman Legends.

Since most of the visual novel parts are going to be first person, I imagine there will be wayyyyy more faces to use for animations.

Here's a devlog that goes over some of the rigging stuff and how stuff is in motion. I recently got a new computer and started using it, so apologies if audio is a bit different or something is off. 

I was going to do animations but instead I found this shader on github (https://github.com/paddy-exe/Godot-RealTimeCaustics) and had to try it out, now the water has caustics you can see through.  Though you won't get underwater uhhhh and you probably won't see it maybe I'll find a use for it.

Maybe I'll have water in a beach cave and have that create caustics?

The problem with caustics is that it basically takes place inside of a cube that acts as a cut out, but if a polygon is angled like in the top middle, it kind of distorts due to the cube being basic (to save on processing I imagine), meaning I'll have to model the cave in a very boxy minecrafty way so it doesn't stretch.

But it seems doable! What's the purpose of the cave? Cause I have ADHD and need a way to justify a fancy toy I found on github. Uhhh potentially a dating spot location, yeah that's it.

Doing some animation work! I tend to be getting into the groove at the start of midnight and then I realize I have work tomorrow and will probably get 5 hours of sleep. Which is probably why it takes me til midnight to get back into it. Maybe this weekend I can re-calibrate.

Here's a devlog showing off the animation process to give an idea on how I do stuff:

So this is pretty much the run cycle finished... hopefully the rest of the animations such as jumping and landing will be pretty basic. Most of the animations are basic, I haven't had time to really inject the actual character and personality of Avergmus into the animation, but that usually adds 10+ hours to the animation process (and potentially a lifetime of professional experience).


Against my better judgement, I have about 2 hours of footage of me making the entire run cycle (though some extra time after recording was spent polishing aka 3 hours of tweaking graph handles). It's mostly me fumbling with Blender but hopefully this gives some insight on how 3D game animation is made:

So today was Victoria day (a work day off holiday for Canadians as far as I know, not really in UK for some reason). So me and Cowberry the composer decided to work together in the same room for some good ol fashioned local game jamming like we used to before the pandemic. I got animations done for Avergmus and got them sort of okay blended together in the movement (some things seem to be missing from the run cycle somehow...). Truth be told there isn't much platforming in this, it's mostly an excuse to bounce between VN/dating +shooting segments. Some things came really well together, I also took a stab at animating a storyboard sequence for the anime opening and Cowberry timed out all the parts reall well as you can see in the devlog.

THE PROBLEM, is I forgot that doing ingame cinematics is a fucking nightmare especially when timing it to music. There are multiples ways of charting it out but since Godot's animation editor isn't as robust as say.. premiere where you can scrub through audio, it's really hard to line things up. I had to export the animation to 60 fps and did simple tests to make sure a cut would line up based on the exact frame, but no dice, the frames seem to be off by 7-8. At 60 fps this can get a little annoying so I'm considering at least trying for 24 fps to narrow it down, even if the output will do 60 fps (and EVEN if godot has a really bad measuring method). That's not even getting into syncing into the audio which is a bit of a headache along with the editing.

This isn't even getting into the animation part which I think I can handle. It's just a matter of making the characters and giving them simple posing and getting the most out of smart camera work. Lot of anime in the 80s tend to just have characters standing or walking in place (due to budgets) but also sometimes it was just impressive to animate a character spin around... which is easy with in-game cinematics and full 3D. Anyway you can see me complain about this in the devlog, and also listen to my cat meow to the music almost on beat (also I had no idea she was scratching the door, because I'm hearing impaired and with headphones).

Against my better judgement I decided to show some irl footage of my work setup and went over some the woes I've been having. Mainly that maintaining a 9-5 game studio job (remote) while making a game is hard to adjust to. Sure it could not be remote and not be computer based but I feel like since both activities are at the same work station it's a bit hard to seperate the two or want to keep working after more work. I also not been getting enough sleep lately mainly due to the cat waking me up at 6am and me getting very fragmented 4-6 hour sleep at best. So really the week days didn't see much progress beyond some work done on the anime intro. Compared to the holiday I did full time on. Today Cowberry is gonna do the rest of the vocals on my decent microphone and I'll be conditioned to get the actual game part of the game done.

I'll report back after sunday if I managed to make do.

New devlog don't have time to type:

Speedrunning these devlogs, these are hot off the presses:

Little happy accident happened where leaving the ik on lets you spin the waist, since Gigantimus spine just sorta... collapsed it made it easier to hide the twist in the spring part. Which I think adds to the differences between two characters.

Another devlog going into it:

Decided to model two characters at the same time and texture also, really wanted to at least rig them in the end of the day but time caught up to me. A devlog to show them in the game at least:

So just got off work and it's thursday here's my plan for finishing the game cutting up the environment texturing/modeling into 30 min chunks. Then switch to actually making the dang game 8 pm onwards til 3. I'm doing all of this quickly to make any time for the anime opening which might just be characters standing around who knows.

submitted

https://shweep.itch.io/gigantimus-zx-love-never-rusts

I want to update a 1.1 later and maybe even a 1.2 if a monday stream for it is possible