bitemegames

Daily Report - 29/03/2024

Randomized adventurers

‘tis but a flesh wound

Thomas has been enjoying working on creating the code for our modular characters. Currently this is with a mix of Synty and our new custom assets, with a side effect being that our characters only have their hair, torso & pants currently randomized, without arms and legs, since we’re still waiting on some more assets from our side before we can implement those. There were some struggles originally, with figuring out the rigging, and how everything was going to come together, but we’re working through that.

What’s Next?

Today we’re supposed to release our first video in a few months with a sponsor, and I am currently hating my life because dealing with sponsors is pain, let’s hope they send approval in the coming hours still. Other than that, we keep working on quests, our characters, and on the new setpiece models for filling up our guild.

“I see now that the circumstances of one's birth is irrelevent,it is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.” - Mewtwo

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 28/03/2024

Foundations laid

Guildhall layout

One building foundation and front porch later, the main layout for our guild is getting ready. We have some merge issues left to put it into our main guildhall scene, and then we can move on to creating the actual setpieces for our guild, so we don’t have a single large empty space anymore (cuz it looks kind of sad currently). 

What’s Next?

More quest work (surprise), we’re making some progress on our modular NPC adventurers as well.

The foundation felt so lonely it decided to make some concrete plans for the weekend.

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

World overhaul, Windows, Quests

Guild expansion

So far our guild has been looking a bit small and out of place. Time to upgrade our guild's layout. We've got multiple different rooms planned,

The below GIF isn't fully there yet, as we still have to update our terrain, and add the code that correctly shows/hides certain parts of the guild when unlocked (right now everything is unlocked, and grass pokes through the floor, since this is part of the terrain and not a prefab). We also want to add some verticality by raising/lowering certain rooms with stairs between them.

Finalized Environment

Yesterday we wrapped up the final texturing needed for our environment, which makes it about 80-90% release ready if you ask me. We will probably need to make some smaller changes later on in terms of exact building placement, depending on our final guild size.

Quests

Of course, a pretty game doesn't matter if your game's core doesn't work. It's a monster of a core, but we're slowly but steadily making progress in that regard.

We're definitely having some scope creep currently in regards to the generation of the quest "intel" (what you as the player get, to then turn into the actual quest), so we may be cutting some of that depending on the implementation/amount of content required.

We've got some basic visuals in terms of the creation of a quest already, on the left you get the information from the questgiver, the right window will then be your "control panel" as the guild master, figuring out what level of skills will be required for this quest, and other details such as gold split, required proficiencies,...

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

• We reworked our camera controller to use a more common Sims-style control layout

• You can now open/close window shutters

What's Next?

Whilst we've been making progress on quests, we're still not there yet. Our goal is to get this in a first finished/"playable" state over the next week, after which we can do some first internal playtesting, and then in 2 weeks, go and run a limited playtest through our Discord server.

Now that our environment is fully done, it looks a bit dead without anyone walking around. We're now tackling the issue of modular adventurers/NPCs, with some challenges there in terms of rigging and getting the different parts to actually match up correctly. Currently we just had a single Synty character as a placeholder, but this is not what we want as our final goal.

We'll also be looking into getting a rudimentary system in place for unlocking the different guild areas, and start focusing on creating some setpiece models for all of them.

Daily Report - 27/03/2024

Tooling, Environment done

Everything’s a hammer

With our quest system getting closer to a first version, we’re now also taking to heart our tooling-first approach. We’re using Odin inspector a lot in Guild Architect, making custom tools to quickly make pretty much everything that a quest needs: locations, rewards, informants, information,…

Our environment is done, finally

You’ve heard my yap on and on about it for the past 2 weeks at this point, but we’re finally done with our full environment surrounding the guild. It’s fully textured, and pretty much production ready at this point. So we’ll have a guaranteed pretty game at least. Some great work has been done if you ask me in regards to the environment, and I believe this will help us greatly in simply marketing  the game as well, and making it a success (now we just need a good quest system, right William 😊)  

What’s Next?

With the environment done, we’ll be shifting some of our art focus back on our characters (advisors & dynamic NPCs). We’ll continue working on the quest system, and our guild hall in general.

“There are a thousand ways to be smart” – Jeff Bezos

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 26/03/2024

Art updates 

More exterior and guild progress

With both our programmers out yesterday, progress has been made mostly on the visual aspect, where we are getting close to getting our environment finalized, as well as the full guild layout instead of just having a big empty space in said environment. 

What’s Next?

Today marks the start of a new sprint, but some of the main things we want to tackle ASAP are figuring out a prototype for our visually randomized workers, and getting that quest system first implementation done, so we can finally test it.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Master Oogway

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Tierlisting business books that improve gamedev

My full goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/95758140-marnix-wyns

Timestamps:
00:00 Gamedev is business
01:22 Your Next 5 Moves - Patrick Bet David
04:13 The art and business of online writing - Nicholas Cole
06:06 Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willinck
08:22 The psychology of selling - Brian Tracy
10:23 Millionaire Fastlane - MJ DeMarco
12:44 Deep Work - Cal Newport
15:34 The compound effect - Darren Hardy
17:14 Dotcom Secrets - Rusell Brunson
19:56 Can't hurt me - David Goggins
21:43 The personal MBA - Josh Kaufman
23:39 $100 Million Offers - Alex Hormozi
26:10 Daily Stoic - Ryan Holiday
27:05 The creative gene - Hideo Kojima
28:34 Stolen Focus - Johann Hari
30:26 The 4-hour workweek - Tim Ferris
32:36 Overview

Daily Report - 25/03/2024

Stay focused!

New camera, controls & cursors

Last report I already talked about the plans for new camera controls, to be more Sims like. This has now been fully implemented, with a smooth curve when zooming in/out, multiple ways to pan the camera around, and some other nice to haves. Another thing we did is add a quick win with multiple cursors & cursorstates (currently reusing the icons from Forge Industry), so it’s clear when you are able to interact with something, rotating the camera,...

What’s Next?

Today will be a calmer day, with both our programmers being out. We’ll continue working on our guild, and the surrounding environment.

Don't derail your level design, stay on track!

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 22/03/2024

Better camera, expanding our guild

Say cheese

We recently encountered some “struggles” with our camera and its corresponding controls. We’re remedying this by overhauling everything the camera does, and how the player interacts with the game. A big difference here (and shown in the above gif) is how we’ve moved from FOV-based zooming (which is dumb) to a more traditional zoom. On top of that, depending on how zoomed in you are, the angle of the camera changes as well, so you can really feel like you’re part of the guild if you want.

Architecture 101

With our main walls, doors & windows done now, it’s time to start working toward putting the entire guild layout into the main game. This will be a bit of a puzzle still, and will be some Unity magic to make certain areas appear later on through unlocks, but that’s worries for another daily update.

What’s Next?

William is gone today, Thomas will be continuing on our controls and camera, Alexandra will be continuing her guild architecting, and Sarah-Luna will (probably? not 100% certain) be getting close to finalizing more and more textures of the area surrounding our guild.

“Hippety hoppity, The Sims 4’s controls are now our property” - William

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 21/03/2024

It’s like a video, but I can’t cut 

Another presentation

Yesterday Thomas and I ventured back to his company, to once again talk about gamedev, inspire people to become gamedevs themselves, and improve our own speaking/presentation skills.

What’s Next?

Playtime’s over for Thomas, character randomization and our new camera should really start getting a look soon, as we haven’t really been making any progress on that front. Work will continue on our greater guild hall as well in the art department.

The success of a presentation will be judged not by the knowledge you send but by what the listener receives.

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Even more visuals, quest WIP

The past week was a bit slower on code-based mechanics, as Thomas took a week off to go snowboarding in the alps.

Further visuals progress

In the meantime, our artists kept working on the art. Last week our surrounding scenery was still very greyboxed, some further work has been done there texturing the individual houses that are part of the backdrop. Initially we wanted to leave it in a greyboxed state for a while, but it was only going to be a few extra days now, and would be something that 95% certain won't change anymore throughout development. 

Also in terms of the guild itself, we've been working on that as well, creating various doors, and starting work on our windows as well (more info on their usage soon).

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

- Beat some sense into our grid system asset, so it doesn't allow for placing props where they aren't allowed to be placed anymore (you could cheat this if you placed a props in less than 2 frames from selection).

What's Next?

Now that Thomas is back from his vacation, we can dump a load of work on him again. The big thing(s) we want to work on now is reworking our control scheme already (it's really that bad currently), as well as lay down the core for our randomized adventurers/NPCs in the game. 

With the core blocks of the guild hall (walls, floors & windows getting done as well), we'll be expanding this as well over the coming weeks, creating the full floor plan of our guild, instead of the 2 rooms standing on their own currently. 

William will be taking 2 days of PTO as well in the coming days, but I hope we can get some more tangible progress on our quest system, as this has been dragging on quite a bit the past week(s). 

Lastly, as the core to those customized adventurers is being made, we're focusing more on characters again as well, working on turning our barmaid into a 3d character in the game. 

Q&A March

Some old, underrated videos:
- At a Japanese indie convention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKNQhZhoFVQ
- BiteMe video BTS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9wi7bVZVkg
- Unit Testing in Unity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTvAvOKXvFk

Daily Report - 20/03/2024

Chug Chug

Mechanics are hard

Another limited update today, as William continues to fight the core of our game, quest assignment. Since we’re so early in development, the core mechanics of our game take quite a while to make, as we need to lay the entire foundation at once. This means we don’t have as many updates on a day-to-day basis, but I expect this to change relatively soon (2-4 weeks) when we can start working on that foundation, adding smaller incremental changes, as well as the side mechanics for the different areas of our guild.

What’s Next?

Today we’ll be giving another IRL presentation about getting started with gamedev, so there will be a bit less code crunched today. Apart from that, some issues with seamless texturing need to get some attention, and we’ll start working on creating some of our additional advisor characters soon.

I'm not sure how many problems I have because math is one of them

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 19/03/2024

Some stats about the latest sale

We’re broke

Every sale, I do a little post in here about how our sales numbers greatly spiked again compared to our regular cadence. This time, there isn’t much of that visible. In the last 4 days since the Spring Sale started, we’ve sold a total of 7 copies. With our previous sales, this was what we sold on day one basically. Is this unexpected? Not totally, those who saw my monthly business review know that I was expecting Steam revenue to drop to near zero, until we release our next game at this point (So let’s get cracking on that!).

What’s Next?

Fed up with the current implementation of controls, we’ll be giving those a big overhaul, as well as how our camera works in terms of zooming (who even does FOV based zoom??). We’ll also block out the main guild hall now, and get to slicing up our characters so we can start looking into the randomized NPC logic/visuals.

I'm not broke, I'm pre-rich

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Our gamedev hot takes 🌶️

2 weeks ago we roasted our viewers' hot takes on YouTube, now it's our turn to give some bad/hot takes from our own.

This video was originally planned to go on YouTube, however we made some mistakes in the tone of delivery. Because of this, we will be making it a Patreon inclusive instead, as it doesn't fit on the main channel anymore.

We still love you all!

Submit your Q&A questions

We're approaching another monthly Q&A. 

What are some things you've been dying to ask Marnix (or the rest of the team) about? These can be about anything and everything; gamedev, YouTube, how to make S-tier brownies,...

Leave them as a comment here, or through our Discord #patreon-insider channel.

Daily Report - 18/03/2024

Finished our environment

Our anime-esque style

I’ve been yapping about this quite a bit lately, but we’re reaching the point now where after a week of grey boxing, shader configs, and git fights, we’re getting to a good stage for the surroundings of our guild. There’s currently an open Merge Request, although we’re still going to need to check why exactly our pipeline is failing there, otherwise, we can mark this as finished for the time being. As we’re later in our development, we can give another pass to texturing our greyboxes, those currently don’t matter as much for the game.

What’s Next?

With our environment done, something else that we need to start looking into sooner rather than later is our modular NPCs. We’re also reaching a point where we have the core blocks from our guild itself (walls, windows, door), so if we can get the full guild “built” already, and implement the unlocking mechanics, that can be another great win.

Thomas has also returned after a week of vacation, so we can start cranking out more code as well.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 15/03/2024

Quest UI

Graphic design is my passion

I know, I know, it doesn’t look that great yet, but it’s functionally a good start already. Yesterday William implemented the UI for creating a new quest.This will be one of the windows players will interact with the most, so it’s important we get this working early so we can iterate a lot on it (and looking at the current version, I already know I will be overhauling it at some point).

What’s Next?

Making the quest UI more pretty & functional. Apart from that, we’re finishing up our outdoor environment, whilst getting some more of the guild hall models (mainly doors currently) finished up, so we can update the look of the hall itself next week.

Why are we still here… Just to pay taxes

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 14/03/2024

Marching forward

The grind is eternal

Since everyone is working on relatively big tasks, and our team is down one, there isn’t much cool to update everyone one today. We’re getting closer to final results regarding mechanics and visuals, but aren’t fully there yet.

What’s Next?

We’ll keep working on finalizing our respective tasks, William is starting to make some first progress with visualizing quests in-game now as well, although that will still take a bit to get done. Another Steam sale is starting tonight as well, so Forge Industry will most likely sell a few copies again as well.

Gamedev feels like solving a Rubik's Cube blindfolded: challenging, yet rewarding

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Visuals, Visuals & even more Visuals

Shader & Environment overhauls

One of the big worries we had, as also talked about in our Guild Architect Pre-mortem, was a lack of progress on the visual front. Especially since we wanted to get carried by the visuals more this time, going for that anime-aesthethic, it was really important to us to get this implemented as fast as possible. 

I'm happy to report that we've been making some amazing progress with that already. We had decided to go with the Quibli shader, which offers a lot in terms of foliage and skyboxing already, along with those anime outlines. 

One thing to note is that this isn't merged into our master branch yet, so the below screenshots don't have this lucious shader applied to them yet.

More props

Apart from the surroundings, our guild itself is also getting some upgrades, such as new walls, floors and doors, getting rid of the generic Synty placeholders. This also allows us to really double down on the very specific aesthethic we're going for. 

Animations

We also only had T-posing characters so far, but that meant our guild didn't really feel that lively. The goal is that all of the adventurers the player interacts with, sending them out on quests, training them,... are physically present in the guild as well, doing stuff. 

There's still a bit of jank that needs to be ironed out however before we can scale this further, as the more characters can interact with eachother, the more likely they are to freeze up and die.

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

- Our Adventurer NPCs are now smarter, coming into the guild as solo adventurers, and trying to join/form parties through our GAIA system. This isn't that visual yet, so expect a more in-depth explenation regarding this in the next week(s).

What's Next?

This week was a bit slower on the programming side, as Thomas is currently on vacation for a week. However, we're planning to get our core quest system near-completion by next week. 

On the visual front, in the coming days we should be able to near finalize our environment already, after which our character/environment artist will look into the modular creation of our various adventurers, so they can be randomized and all look unique/differently. 

As for props, we're going to be focusing on the core outline of the guild, so things like more doors, windows, walls, and staircases, before moving on to some of the smaller props that the player will be able to put down in the world. 

Lastly, we're starting to work on getting some rough concepts for our key promo art, so we'll start looking for a comission for that in the coming week as well. 

Daily Report - 13/03/2024

Lots of visual updates

Environmental art, round 2

After some setbacks with git, gitignore, and Unity’s way of dealing with asset files, we’re starting to make a lot of progress on the visuals surrounding our guild, and the general vibe we wanted the game to go for. We’re also getting more progress with the blockout of the surrounding city. We still have to fill in the empty space, with temporary buildings that get nuked as the player will be expanding the guild, and then the main blockout and visuals are good to go already.

Custom artpieces

Until now, everything in the game that was textured, was using Synty assets. These don’t vibe as well with our shader however, and also don’t exactly fit the final style we’re going for. Alexandra has been working on getting the building blocks of our guild up to snuff now, with custom walls, floors, doors and more. One thing to note here is that the visuals in the above screenshots are still from before the shader configuration, so they’ll end up looking a bit different once both branches get merged together.

What’s Next?

William will keep his grindset on the party system, some solid progress has been made there already code wise, however it’s just not the most visual feature yet. I’ll also get cracking on submitting our 2 code assets to itch.io/Unity.

You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 12/03/2024

Chugging along

No flashy progress

It’s gonna be a short one today, we’ve all been working/struggling with our current tasks, so we’ll just be continuing with those.

What’s next?
We’re going to keep working on our respective tasks; creating doors/windows, the environment, and our party/adventurer code.

The gamedev grind separates the dreamers from the doers.

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Why Guild Architect will FAIL

Thomas and Marnix sit down to talk about the challenges ahead with Guild Architect, and how we'll (try to) overcome them.

Daily Report - 11/03/2024

Environment, we’re in hot water

New environment progress

Until recently, our world was a simple, puke-green colored slab of grass, with some Synty assets thrown into the mix. Over the past few days, Sarah-Luna has been working with our shader, in getting our surrounding environment more up to snuff, and getting the visuals towards a style that we believe fits the game. There have been a few setbacks however due to git struggles, but I believe we’ll be able to reach our desired result regardless.

We got cancelled?!

Last Friday, we released our hot takes video. Some backlash was expected here, since it contains a bunch of controversial topics. However, that didn’t really end up being the reason why we got an above-average amount of negative feedback. Instead, this was due to a very hostile and baseless approach to our audience (calling our audience idiots, peanut brains,…). Because of this, it seemed very tone-deaf to upload the sequel of that video to YouTube, as it has the same issues that the first one has, namely, needless aggression towards our viewers. We’ll be turning the sequel into a Patreon exclusive, with an extra warning at the start, and I will be more strict in terms of not breaking the rule of insulting the audience.

What’s next? 

Today marks the start of our next sprint, so we’ll be planning the exact tasks today, but generally the goal is to reach a playable state by the end of the sprint, 2 weeks from now.

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to continually fear you will make one.” – Elbert Hubbard

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 08/03/2024

Interior decorating

Custom walls & floors

Whilst Sarah-Luna is working on expanding the world around our guild, Alexandra has been doing some home-reno, breaking out the old floors and walls, and replacing it with a more stylized approach there.

What’s next? 

Thomas has some exciting things in store still for our adventurers & parties which should be wrapped up today, our artists continue on with the art, and William is delving into the catacombs to resolve some bugs regarding Forge Industry.

Bugs are like uninvited guests at your party. They show up unexpectedly, trash the place, and take forever to leave.

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 07/03/2024

Greyboxing

Expanding our world

Yesterday, Sarah-Luna continued on making our world feel more like a real world and not a prototype scene, getting some more custom greyboxed assets in already to show the vision of the guild. New now as well is our foliage such as trees and bushes, which are part of our shader as well.

What’s next? 

We’re starting to get the main mechanics figured out, and we’re on track with the greyboxing of our scene as well, so let’s just continue with those!

We write code for fun, and get paid to fix bugs.

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Business Overview - February 2024

Get our assets for free: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-assets-99382980

Notion GDD template: https://marnixwyns.notion.site/One-page-GDD-495ce2b9cd8f4d62b0d5e416dd33f1f2

High-level changes & reworks

We have been doing some reflecting the past few days. As a result of that, we're changing some of the key priorities and tasks for Guild Architect. 

Making the game look like a game

One of the key pillars of Guild Architect was also our more anime-inspired visuals. Despite this vision, we hadn't really been working on that over the past few weeks, focusing instead on concepting characters without seeing if our vision of the game was even possible.

To remedy that, we've put the character art on hold for a moment (although we did finish our first main character model)

Instead, we are focusing on configuring our Quibli shader, and getting custom assets implemented for the most visual parts of our game (walls, floors,...), so they can interact with said shader as well.

Making the game play like a game

One of the big issues that has been raised over the past week(s) is that we were adding a bunch of mechanics, but were doing so somewhat aimlessly. We had our lore system, we could see stats about adventurers, but there was still not a single game loop. 

To remedy this, we put a hard stop to any further development work, and have instead fully refocused on working out what are game is actually going to be; what are the different mechanics; what's our core hook...

We're now starting to get a better idea in terms of what's actually in scope (turns out, a lot more than I originally thought), and what our priorities should be. This is kind of boring work, and definitely not visual, but it's something we sorely needed, as we also had no real idea of things like lose conditions, and what the core of our game would even be. 

We've determined about 6-7 game loops now, 2 of which are truly core to the game (quest assignments & tavern management). With these known, we can start working towards actually getting these implemented.

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

• Added animations to our adventurers instead of T-posing, to get more of that game-feel. 

What's Next?

Our artists will keep focussing on the visual style of our guild, getting everything in the apropriate anime-style. We're also reaching a point where most of our mechancis are more thought out now, so we can reschedule our priorities and start working on actually implementing these (more thought-out) mechanics. 

Also, stay tuned for our Patreon bonus video next Monday, where we do a full pre-mortem of the different reasons why Guild Architect would fail as well, and what we would be doing to remedy that (we recorded this before this weekly update, hence why we're changing a bunch of our priorities). 

Daily Report - 06/03/2024

Working towards our unique look

Visual Improvements

With both artists working on the Guild’s visual look now, we’re making some solid progress there. Yesterday we got a first version of our new walls, which also look different now that our Quibli shader is being further configured. This last one also got an updated skybox, to really fit that summery anime aesthetic.

What’s next? 

William is wrapping up our documentation/planning for the different mechanics/game loops, and our artists will continue working on the visual look of the game.

Why did the game developer go to therapy? To resolve their unresolved parent-child relationships

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Daily Report - 05/03/2024

Our first character, more life

Custom characters

Yesterday Sarah-Luna got around to finishing our main character’s 3D model, and shoving him in game. This will already be a good first step towards getting that final vision of our characters’ art style in the game.

Some dynamicism

And then speaking of characters, apart from our advisors, we’ll also have both adventurers and regular townsfolk populating your guild, making it a more lively place. A crucial part of this is giving them custom animations, and letting them walk around, all “leading their own lives” as part of that simulation we’re running in the background. Even though this is currently still all done with Synty, I think it’s a great addition already to the game.

What’s next?
With our main character done, the art focus moves to overhauling our guild itself, changing out the walls, floors and other key elements, getting them closer towards the final vision/look of the game that we’re going for. William will keep working on getting our core mechanics/gameplay loops fleshed out.

Why did the developer go broke? Because they used up all their cache

Marnix Wyns

Producer & content creator @ BiteMe Games

Final lessons from cancelling Songs of Everjade