Status Update, July 2025

Overview

• Shinmera: released blender-rectangle-tools

• Shinmera: released PromptFont v 1.10

• Shinmera: released trial-particle-studio

• Shinmera: contributed SF3 image support to ImageMagick

• Shinmera: designed a new enemy type

• Shinmera: wrote the first draft of Act 1

• Shinmera: various improvements to dialogue, camera, etc etc etc.

• Domolutz: rigging for Sandra, Harriott, and the new enemy type

Some Details

Every month I write this summary I have to go over the git history and my chat history and so on to even remember what all I did, and every time I somehow end up astounded at everything that happened. I just... can't remember.

Anyway, this month started out with me working on some dialogue interaction stuff to let you look at interactables in the game. As part of that I wanted to have Weiss rotate her head towards something interesting in the scene, so I implemented a look-at system:

While at it I also revised the photo mode to look much nicer, and made a bunch of new icons for PromptFont along with it, hence the new PromptFont version 1.10 release.

After that I spent a good while writing out the details of the first act of the game, including all the dialogue pieces and environment setpieces we'll need and so on. There's a recording session with the voice actor for Weiss coming up next month, and I'm really excited to get her lines for these pieces in game.

Then I finally decided to bite the bullet and work on a plugin for Blender that lets me draw rectangular geometry with some semblance of convenience, since that's a very, very common need when making maps, and one that base Blender does not fulfil at all.

The plugin is of course freely available for everyone, and you can now even get it directly within blender's own extensions UI. How convenient!

Next I worked on finally improving the display of the splatmap. I'd had the idea of using a signed distance field for the splats for years but only now got around to trying that. Using an SDF both gives very sharp splats, reduces the necessary size of the splatmap, and lets me implement a "drain" effect.

I also designed a new enemy type, the first robotic type and modelled it. Dominic even got around to rigging it this week:

Robots only appear in the second act of the game though, so it'll be a bit before these guys actually get added. For now we still have plenty of work to do with the blobs and the environments for Act 1.

Dominic did also implement the rigs for the other two characters in the game though, since Eileen finished the models for them, so here's a first look at Sandra and Harriott:

Finally in the past few days I've been working on improving the visual look of the game. I was unsatisfied with the general lighting and colour present in the game, so I messed around with the ambient occlusion baking, lighting setup, fog, and colour grading.

And today I took that a bit further still by creating a custom colour lookup table to adjust things even further:

I'm still not entirely happy with the look, but I'll take a breather for now since I feel like I'm getting tunnel vision.

Next month aside from the voice acting stuff I also want to look at adding more detail into the environment. The super tall ceilings I added now already help tremendously to give a much stronger impression, but I want to add some more detail in the geometry, which means more Blendering. I'm not very good at Blendering.

Anyway, I'll try to get myself to work on it. And if I can't get myself to, I'm sure I'll get something worthwhile done anyway.

I should note though that I'll be on holidays the last week of August and the first week of September. I'm going to Sapporo, Japan for two weeks! To save costs I had to pick a really horrendous flight: 11 hours to Bangkok, 18 hours layover, 6 hours to Sapporo. I'm already dreading it now. But I'm looking forward to being able to properly unwind for a bit before my Psychology studies start in September and my whole life is thrown into disarray.

And... well, yeah, I have no clue how things are going to go in September. I'll try to keep up with stuff, but since I'll be in lectures most days and got exercises to do and books to read the other days... Well, it's all a matter of what my brain will decide to have energy for, I suppose.

I've also signed a contract with Charles to do work on optimising Kandria and Trial in August. I just kept thinking about how we left Kandria so, so close to the finish line of actually being able to release on Switch and got very depressed about that. But I also just do not have the motivation to work on optimising it to get it there. So after a lot of internal turmoil I decided I'd expend a bit more dosh to try and get it there.

Not that I'll be able to just release it once the optimisation is done, certification takes a lot of other crap, but... at least it'll be playable, and that's already a huge success.

I've also signed a contract with my composer, Mikel, who should be delivering a first demo track by next month. I'm super excited to finally get some real ambience into the game. I'm a huge lover of video game music, and I really loved working with Mikel for Kandria's OST, so I have great hopes for Weiss, too.

So yeah... one more month of "business as usual" before everything changes. Let's make it a good one!

— Love, Shinmera ❤️

Ps: the test print of the new calendar arrived and it looks gorgeous! If you'd like a copy, please pre-order it on Ko-Fi:

https://ko-fi.com/s/d47b5ddf51