MONTHLY(?) UPDATE #3 — Catching up!
Hi everyone! I hope you’ve been safe this year.
This blog has sure been left dusty for awhile, huh? Truth be told, after MAGFest and the Nightdive Exposé (did you see our trailer back in March?), the game’s been all over the place. You’ve probably heard similar things from other devs, but to say 2020 has been rough on development is, to put it mildly, a gross understatement.
D-CELL GAMES has always been a remote-work studio, which our workflows have remained largely unchanged. However, COVID-19 and all that that entails has left a good chunk of us in particularly precarious positions. Especially given the fact that we’re running the project on a shoe-string budget, it’s been a challenge to maintain both pace of production and our team’s health, especially with so many factors outside of our control.
But we’re not down for the count — things are starting to finally come together. We’ve been steadily evolving the game’s combat based on the feedback we’ve received from friends and players at MAGFest, and we’re making much more progress on upgrading our systems and finally finishing development on our vertical slice. This winter, we’re going to be kicking things into gear and bringing it all together!
assembling more of the band
First, since we’ve last posted on here, a few new people have joined the project. Mireille (developer of the excellent Space Punk Slam Dunk), our new programmer on the project, has done excellent work refactoring our code across the board.
Simply put, she’s a lifesaver.
Combat runs smoother than ever with her involved — and soon, we’ll be able to say the same about the dialogue system, which she is updating to feature the latest version of Yarn and powerful features per the request of our game’s writer, RJ.
In addition, we went on a hunt for an additional animator to help out with our ballooning asset count. Thankfully, that hunt’s over — we’re happy to bring Taqi (@Taqibunn on Twitter) on board the project!
hello! you can call me Taqi, does lots of 2d animations by day, brainrots anime and kpop by night. i’m happy to announce that i’m helping out as an animator for Unbeatable!
a week at d-cell games
This week at D-CELL GAMES has been incredibly busy, so I thought it’d be a good opportunity to show you all what development on the game’s been like!
As of this month, we’ve established a very strong idea of what December and January’s development will focus on — with December primarily centered on development of the Vertical Slice. I’ve been regularly piecing things out to make sure that we can keep production going as smooth as possible. This means making sure we get pre-production completed on our various pipelines for the VS (vertical slice) right as we complete production on our current pipelines. Busy, taxing stuff!
On top of that, I’ve still been making all of the beatmaps for the game. I’m not able to elaborate today, but let’s just say that this has been some of my best work yet - though I suppose that is what happens when you have to remake the beatmaps for some of these songs, like, six times.
Usually we start the week with what we dub “Monday Check-ins” — I perform one-on-one check-ins with the rest of the team about where things are at and make sure everyone knows what their game plan is this week. On Wednesday, we do the equivalent of a stand-up meeting in the afternoon, and whoever’s able to come on can report where things are at, as well as grab people for important discussions and scenarios. If there’s something going on in the week, it’s likely happening in the middle of it, so this is usually a good time to regroup the team for that!
And then on Friday, we have our prodigal team meetings, where we get together and have important conversations, share progress, test builds, and stay up all night arguing about video games and playing VALORANT dailies.
combat and equipment
For this week, our game’s director, Andrew, has been working on doing completely new animations for the combat system — about time!
To keep the combat looking dynamic and fluid, there’ll be many different variations of attacks present to make the fight flow fresh — here’s a look at some of them, in fact!
These are animated in Clip Studio PAINT EX. The hidden challenge to the animation work isn’t just the grueling animation, but also the implementation of it into the game. Getting all of these different kinds of animations to smoothly transition together and feel good in play is very much a trial-and-error process according to Andrew. Later on he’ll be making original enemy designs for the different “note types” Beat will be fighting as well!
Elsewhere, TJ is busy working on new music for the game. While we can’t show any of that today, TJ has a lil bit to say about the new equipment he’s been using!
Take it away!
Hey there! For the past few months, I’ve been hunkered down, plucking away at some new tunes for your earholes. But in addition, I’ve also put together a whole new guitar rig specifically tailored for the UNBEATABLE soundtrack. I’ve briefly shown it on Twitter, but how about we give the rig a proper introduction?
That blue beauty there is a Les Paul Standard 2012 in a blue mist finish. Not only does it feel great to play, but is also a super versatile guitar; the knobs on the bottom can be pulled to alter the circuitry of the pickups, which means I can basically make this guitar not sound like a Les Paul if I really want to. Great for getting a single-coil bite similar to a Tele or Strat.
Coming in at the opposite end of the color spectrum, I have my Orange stack. It’s a TH30 amp head plugged into a PPC212 cab. It’s loud. It’s mean. It kicks ass. It’s got a really smooth crunch for those really intense rhythm combat sections. But it has a soft side with the clean channel, which gives me room to play some pretty chords that you might hear in the background during exploration segments.
I’d love to dive into some pedals, but I’m already taking too long with this “quick” update. We’ll just save that rabbit hole for a future blog post, yeah?
Of course, this comes hand-in-hand with RJ’s music supervision, Rachel’s vocals, and Vasily’s mixing. Vasily’s main work for the VS is going to consist of overhauling the game’s sound design — so here’s a anecdote from him about that!
I’ve been told to keep it short and succinct so I don’t drag on about my philosophy about sound design for five pages, but I’ll definitely write up on that at another point. My role as a primary composer has been shifted more towards sound design, background music tracks, and mixing/mastering the music for the game at the moment. It’s been an interesting journey approaching this new genre of sound design I’m not familiar with, and I’ve been looking for what I call the “Holy Grail” of anime sound effects. You’ve heard the sound effects from Dragon Ball Z or Smash Brothers, or even the ones from Evangelion; I’ve been trying to emulate the sound in those titles that I have so many memories of, and they are kept under an incredibly locked down trade secret so trying to recreate them from scratch has been an interesting challenge.
We’re also going to be still having a strong focus on foley (homemade, home grown, self recorded audio) for a lot of the environmental sound effects, and I personally love it because it ushers a strong desire to go out to an interesting location to get unique samples that’d otherwise be from an incredibly low quality youtube video from 2009. If you haven’t heard of Sylvia Massey, I’d definitely recommend checking out her YouTube channel because she’s been an inspiration to me because of her ‘adventure audio’ philosophy. She explores lots of interesting recording locations like an abandoned nuclear reactor chimney to record echoes from a bass guitar, and it rules.
I’ve also been looking at gear, and if you’ve been in the music production or recording industry, you can probably relate to the hubris of music gear. I’ve been mixing the music on a pair of JBL LSR305s, a Temblor t10, and a pair of AKG K702s. The headphones have been great, but I do miss out on the lower frequency response that I get from my speaker setup, and the speaker setup adds a lot of color that makes it tricky for me to get the music in a stage where I’m happy with how it sounds out of any speaker. That being said, I’ve been looking at a pair of Genelec 8330A monitors and a Focusrite X2P audio interface. I understand that gear doesn’t make the perfect sound, but it certainly helps save time on gauging the correct sound. If I spend less time mixing and mastering the tracks, that’s going to be significantly less strain on my hearing since I have to monitor the track pretty loudly when I mix. Me not getting hearing damage justifies the price, in my opinion.
Rachel and RJ are also doing work on the music with both vocals and supervision respectively. If you’ve been interacting with the UNBEATABLE twitter in the past month or so, you’ve likely been subjected to Rachel’s amazing posts.
In fact, she’s been doing the artwork on recent twitter posts too! In case you missed it, here’s the post she drew for Halloween.
Going forward, especially throughout 2021, several members of the team will be updating the blog themselves to discuss their work on the game! The team’s learned a lot over the few years we’ve spent working on the game, and we really want to share that with you all down the line. If you ask me, everyone’s been doing incredible work, and it hopefully won’t be tooooo long before we get to show more.
happy holidays!
Oh oh! Before we go, this update kicks off our first ever HOLIDAYS WITH D-CELL GAMES! You can expect a full month of fun from us with livestreams and more! You’ll have to wait to see what that more is, so stay glued to our social media and Discord for some fun surprises this Holiday Season!
As for the livestreams, we will be hosting two livestreams this month:
First, we’ll be streaming The Game Awards 2020 on our Twitch tonight, featuring most (if not all) of the team! Come say hi and chat with us! We’re bringing bingo cards and sandwiches. Before the stream starts, we’ll also be playing VALORANT with the team at 5 PM EST too. We hope to see you there!
Second, we’ll host a fun break-night stream on December 17th (though this date is subject to change!). We’ll be playing a variety of games: 100% Orange Juice, Power Bomberman, and possibly even more VALORANT! We’ll also maybe show some of our recent work and some oldddd builds of the game if we’re feeling it.
With that out of the way, I hope you all have a happy holiday season! And yes, we will actually be doing another one of these in January. And hopefully February. I promise! For real.
With love,
Jeff (UNBEATABLE Producer)
