SuperSugoiSoftStudios DevDiary #3: Taking shape

As the development process progresses, dedication will pay off and we will start seeing results from our works. And I must confess that I was hesitant to believe in the project for a few moments.

The progress of this game was exponential. At first, the ideas were fresh, and for me it seems we were still experimenting with tool and features to understand what we really wanted to do to build a game the way – or at least similar to – what we wanted.

Now that we’ve established the effect, the feeling of the scenario, we have lots of things to do.

One very important thing that we decided was the name: SELF. And what it is about? SELF is about a sick woman inside her house. And then we came up with details about this woman’s life, in order to establish and consolidate a character profile.

From that we’ve created concepts to guide us in the writing process.

As for the scenes, after making the drafts, we moved on to build a primary GUI and to establish the rooms connections and camera movement, as you can see below:

The painting process required lots of detailing and fine-tuning. From a rough sketch until the final version, I’ve gone through many different steps besides simply painting: creating a bump map, adding light, casting shadows, enhancing textures.

After that, my husband would still add lights using 2DVL, so that we (and consequently the player) can turn them on and off when desired.

This is the first prototype:

This is the same room as above, final version before bump mapping and after bump mapping.

Finally, this is a corridor with the 2DVL lights on:

The process of implementing new features is almost done; the next stage now consists of using our tools and, basically, hard work.