Since I graduated, I have not been writing devlogs, obviously, but that doesn’t mean the work on BYTE has stopped! In fact, the work on BYTE has remained at a pretty steady pace.

Here on Labor Day (or the day after, oops :} (or two days after, now, lol :\)) I have just wrapped up some pretty significant content additions and revisions. The most notable change on the revisions front is that I have reduced the scope of BYTE by cutting down the number of months in the game significantly. As I reached the end of the first act narratively, I began to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to keep the second and third thirds of the game as dense with events and activities.

As such, I decided to shorten the length of the game and move what I planned on being the end of the first act/first super major plot event into the midway point of the game. (I’m being very vague because this is the first time that I would like to avoid spoilers for the game :0) The game’s start date has moved from the first Sunday of May to the first Sunday of July, reducing the length of the game from six months to four.

This means a few key things: firstly, it means that I am now going to be able to hit my deadlines and target release date much more easily. That’s important. Secondly, it’s going to be much easier for me to ensure that every day in the game is interesting, packed with stuff, and fun to experience. Lastly, it means that I am now halfway content complete!!!!

Well, in actuality, I’m actually significantly more than halfway content complete now, because in the past week I got another ten days or so into the game and have everything through September 14th fully functional (September 1st is the exact halfway point). I’m hoping to keep this pace and be content complete by the end of October. BYTE also ends on October 31st, so if I can just keep my BYTE content addition timeline on a 1:1 pace with my real, human life I should be able to accomplish that.

Enough with those logistics, now we get to talk about the fun stuff: what I added!

Really, most of what I’ve added has been story content so I don’t want to detail it too much here but mechanically I’ve now needed to finally add in other party members. Luckily, when I first made this combat system (ALMOST TWO YEARS AGO), I thought pretty far ahead and created a system that could handle multiple player characters, so I just needed to create the actual skills for everyone.

I have all four party members (Lucy, Mina, Quincey, and Seward) done, as well as each of the first battles that you fight with them in. Each party member has unique abilities and styles, which I think has made the battles much more interesting. I can now lean more heavily into the puzzle aspect of my combat design and one of these party battles doesn’t even have enemies in it. The flexibility that these party members created has been a lot of fun to play around with.

Aside from the party members, I’ve also made larger battle arenas (I can now have combat grids up to 20×20), more enemies (wolves, rats, fire, trees, and a BOSS FIGHT), and have created a system for blockades and disabling tiles to restrict player and enemy routes.

The final aspect of combat that was interesting for me to think about was the player and enemy movement now that they can be blocked and need to be able to move around objects. This required me to implement the A* ALGORITHM. I did the A* algorithm back in high school but haven’t done anything even remotely as complicated since. This was probably the first truly computer science-y thing I’ve done since I took Data Structures in high school. Turns out that A*’s reputation as a super simple algorithm is 100% true, though, and I was able to implement it into my combat movement within a couple hours.

The next steps for BYTE are still just raw content addition. I’m going to need to make some more areas for the next bit, but I would be very happy to have through October 5th in-game done by the end of September. At a minimum, I want through September 21st done, though, so we’ll see where I can get to. (At some point I also need to implement a mechanic that relates to the lunar cycle as well, but we’ll see if I get that in before or after I reach a content-complete state.)

Anyway, this week I made a Steam page! You can wishlist BYTE on Steam right now!

Making the Steam page was a pretty simple process, although it did take me pretty much the full week of time I had to work on the project. I got all my tax information in on Monday and by Tuesday morning it had been approved and I was able to start setting up the page.

I was mostly able to just copy text over from my pitch deck for the game description and short copy, which was nice but I must say, Steam’s online page setup tools are not exactly amazing. The tool to set up your game’s tags was buggy and I had to upload the trailer in Chrome because it straight up did not work in Firefox, but I got it all done.

The longest part was just getting all the images that the page required. In total, I had to make ten different images, each with a hyper-specific size that I would not have made before. This does not include my screenshots which were all straightforward but I did need to get them since I only had GIFs of the new rendering.

I really just used my one hero image and cropped it in about a dozen different ways to get it all fit but now it’s set up and it looks great!

For this upcoming week, I have a couple of finals I need to work on but if I have time I think I’m going to try making some TikToks/videos that I can post to social media (oh, there’s also a twitter now, as well).

Didn’t do a lot of dev work this week on BYTE but I made lots of GIFs!

I ran the pitch deck by Shawn and Ramiro to get feedback and got great feedback, which included bolding key terms, updating my trailer a bit, and doing some other stuff but most of my work was spent on the GIFs, so here they are! (I really don’t have much else to show for this week)

I made a lot more GIFs but in the interest of creating a page that won’t take ten minutes to load, I’ll leave them off this page.

For this next week I’m going to be sending out a lot more pitches, I think. The deck seems ready to roll again, so I’m going to start fresh and see what I can do!

This week in BYTE was all about making the game more visually dynamic to look at. After talking with a coworker about it, he suggested that I get rid of the character portraits entirely, arguing that the visuals were distinct enough that even the new character portraits distracted from the visuals. I didn’t like the idea of getting rid of the portraits initially because I felt like the game would feel too bland just staring at a mostly static image with all the text boxes, but I’ve been thinking about adding cinematic camera angles into the game for a while and that would be a good replacement for the portraits.

I got to work creating a system that could place a dialogue camera in locations based on set shot descriptions that have the shot name and positional data telling the camera where to be in relation to the speaker of the line. It took a few tries to get it all in the right order and find the data that I wanted in, but I got it working and created about ten different shots that I can use freely.

It looks pretty, pretty good, I’ll say. Having the camera move around and being able to zoom in and out gives me much more control over the feel and communication of lines and makes the entire game feel a lot more dynamic. It doesn’t come through as well in images (I haven’t made GIFs yet), but trust me, the difference is very significant.

This week I’m just going to be trying to update all my pitch materials with new GIFs and videos that have my new rendering and cinematics to keep it all up to date with my latest visuals.

Over the past couple of week I did lots of soul-searching and thinking about publishing but that’s not fun.

What is fun?

RENDERING

Finally, after six years of using Unity, I actually understand the entirety of Unity’s rendering process and know how to control it at every stage. I’ve been talking with a coworker a lot about my art style and he was stressing the importance of controlling the resolution of the game whenever you’re working with any sort of pixel-perfect game. (He’s currently porting his Playdate game to PC/Mac so he’s having similar dilemmas as me.) I didn’t fully understand what he meant, though, and while I knew that I should be controlling the resolution that the game renders at, I couldn’t figure out how to do that without using render textures.

Then, after talking to a classmate, I DID IT. I figured out not only how to use render textures, but, more critically, spent a lot of time working out all of the weird banding, compression, and stretching issues I was having. You see, because BYTE is dithered the way that it is, I can’t just output to render textures and have fun with resolution messing. If the render textures don’t perfectly scale to the screen size on scales of 1x, 2x, 3x, etc., then I get weird banding issues where specific rows and columns of pixels will get weirdly stretched out to fit the screen size.

THEN I found out that you can set Unity’s output resolution using a trivially simplistic function that I somehow did not know about, so I combined that with my render textures and now have a system that will find the nearest supported resolution to your monitor’s resolution without going over it, and then force Unity to output to that supported resolution. The game’s render texture will then get set to half that resolution vertically and horizontally re-scaled to be in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The UI renders at full-res 16:9 to retain text clarity.

(Also as a side note I figured out how renderers and render features work and now have separate renderers for my UI and game, one that clips transparent pixels and one that doesn’t. I HAVE CONTROL NOW.)

IT LOOKS VERY GOOD

I was a little haunted by my old shader because while it did look good, I always felt like it looked a little incomplete. It felt too obvious that I was just slapping a shader onto my game output and not doing anything else. Additionally, at high resolutions, the dithering detail became too fine and everything just looked gray instead of dithered.

With the new system, though, the visuals actually feel like I’m taking control of every process and am intentionally choosing how all aspects of the game are being displayed. It feels like a finally complete art direction in a way that it never has before.

Up next I’m pitching to more publishers. I have completely redesigned my ask and timeline so hopefully, it’s a little more fruitful for me as we go forward.

I’ve been pretty swamped getting a build of my Capstone game ready for GDC so this was a slow week but I did manage to get some stuff done.

For starters, I pitched to another five publishers, but again not much to say about that whole process. I rewrote my email template a bit to be more personal/friendly but beyond that I’m just pressing on.

The real work, though, happened on my Dracula model, where I decided to make a new model using the same method as I did for my new Jonathan model. This one turned out arguably even better and I think the design is moving in a good direction. For this one, I separated the arms into separate objects so the mesh doesn’t warp as much when the arms move. This wasn’t really an issue but seemed like a best-practice thing that I might as well try out while making a new model anyway.

I then got my boy into Unity and added textures again, which still looks pretty good. My unwrapping of Dracula’s mesh isn’t exactly great but it seems to be doing its job and I hate unwrapping objects so much I’m going to leave it for now.

Oh, I also spent about two hours fixing Jonathan’s walking animation because the Mixamo animation’s shoulder were super droopy and I needed to clean that up so his arms didn’t snap so aggressively when transitioning from the walk and idle animations. The less said about that, the better, though. It was my first time doing real animation work since high school and went about as smoothly as it could have.

This upcoming week I’ll be pretty busy with Capstone again but am going to go hard on pitches. I think I’m at a point where I just need to start sending them out to the publishers that I think are top fits and seeing what they say. I only have eight or so weeks left until I graduate (yuck) so I’m going to start going more all-out with them.

It’s been a slow couple of weeks for BYTE. I’ve been slowing down pitching until next week after the guest speaker but I have sent off about six or so pitches, of which I got some pretty encouraging feedback (still a rejection, but this one at least felt good). That pitch led to me pitching to a couple of other publishers that weren’t on my radar, but it hasn’t gone any further than that.

I did go through my list of 300 games releasing in 2024 and Google every single one to find its publisher. I started that a while ago but finished it up this past week. I now have a list of 64 publishers that might be decent fits and have sent pitches to eleven. Both of those numbers may wind up going up again as I reevaluate some publishers I didn’t add to my list initially but for now, I will start sending out some pitches again.

I did do some work on BYTE, though. Namely, I started reconsidering my character models. This was, admittedly, not on my list of things to do for BYTE but a lot of the other things I have on my list feel like production things, and I’m trying to step away from full production for a couple of months and start experimenting with things. Also staring at my character models finally drove me insane.

Constantly looking at Jonathan’s stupid 2-polygon collar that looks like a rendering accident and Dracula’s weird, confusing popped cape collar that is there, I guess, finally motivated me to actually redo my models. I started researching how low poly models are supposed to be modeled and tried to be a little more intentional about the whole thing. Dracula and Jonathan in particular have some really messy meshes with honestly way more vertices than they should and I wanted to clean it all up and try adding some texture.

In-game, the new model looks a lot cleaner and I found some fabric textures to use on the suit to actually give a little texture to match the rest of the assets in the game. (I have finally decided that I like the textures and I’m leaning into it.) I also tried creating a face texture for Jonathan that was so insanely disastrous that I simply will not show it to anyone ever, but it’s a possibility that I am keeping in mind and would like to revisit at some point.

In the upcoming week, I’m going to send out another round of pitches and keep whittling away on my new character model idea. Dracula is the other model that definitely needs a substantial redo, but I want to finish Jonathan first. I’m still having some issues with my walking animation being too droopy so I would like to resolve that first.

Over the past week, I started submitting BYTE to publishers! I only sent pitches out to four publishers, but have received feedback from one of them, though I will save that for my presentation next week.

The other major things that have started happening in BYTE land are new attempts at revising the character portraits, which I’ve been talking about seriously for about five months and more generally for about ten months. My big issue with the character portraits is just that they didn’t feel nearly distinct enough for BYTE, which otherwise has a very distinct art style crafted around the game. On the other hand, the portraits just felt like more generic visual novel portraits and didn’t feel like they gave much character to either the characters or the game.

I am currently approaching the character portraits from two different angles:

I. 3D Models as Portraits

This idea has a few key benefits; firstly, I don’t need to worry about the character portraits anymore, which rely on my not-good 2D art skills. Secondly, a 3D approach makes it much easier to animate the character portraits and make the dialogue much more dynamic.

Unfortunately, though, my character models don’t look very good when pushed up close to the camera for this long. These models have many, many issues that don’t matter much when far away, especially when put through the dithering, but up close are much more apparent (just look at Jonathan’s collar in the third picture). Continuing with this style would likely require pretty significant revisions to my models as well as creating a much more intricate animation system. It’s also worth noting that I can animate the characters in the scene already, so I don’t think that animating the character portraits is as important.

II. Medieval Saint Portraits

These portraits I am becoming much more interested in. I had the idea a while ago to make the portraits look like medieval linocut saint portraits, but never had the time to fully explore it. The Arthur portrait uses the classic saint portrait style of depicting a saint in the manner in which they died (often beheaded, holding their head), and since Arthur will eventually be beheaded I thought this could be a fun kind of foreshadowing for his character. Jonathan, on the other hand, is doing the Jesus hand symbol that spells out Jesus’ name in Greek partially to signify that he’s a good Christian boy and partially because I thought it was funny.

I really like where this style is headed, but am admittedly not confident that it will feel at home with the rest of the art style either. I think it’s a step in the right direction, but I’m just not positive yet.

For the next week I’ll probably keep experimenting with the portrait styles to see if I can find any breakthroughs that will guide me to the right place.

I don’t remember what I said I would do last week but what I did do was create several gigabytes of obscenely large GIFs.

I sent my pitch deck to a bunch of my coworkers to get feedback (all of which was very helpful) and the most significant note I got was that all of my images should be replaced with GIFs because they do a much better job of communicating the experience of a game than images. I knew this beforehand and had just hoped that no one would care, but after a couple of people told me to make GIFs, I broke down and started making them.

Originally I just made GIFs for things that seemed particularly significant or helpful to exist in GIF form, but not only were they not enough, but a lot of them were pretty messy because compressing the game down to an MP4 and then compressing the MP4 down to a GIF did some pretty unspeakable things to my game. This meant that I needed to replace all the images in my deck with GIFs and manually cut out particularly ugly frames from the GIFs that I was using.

All of this took basically the entire week as I went through GIF after GIF after GIF, trying to find the right ones. Only after I did all of this did I realize that I also needed a deck with no GIFs, so that I could create a PDF that wasn’t hideous, because PDFs don’t support GIFs (are you sick of all these three-character abbreviations yet, because I AM).

Anyway, I got it all done and it looks sick! I cut and cropped it all to look nice when shared via a view-only Google Sheets link just like this!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Qv8eJvQ08ys7K_0z220Ec6wpIybXqI9jVA9Rr4OAuoA/edit?usp=sharing

Isn’t that easy? (Sorry, I know it takes several minutes to load, such is the cost of using GIFs that are all about 20-50 MB each.)

This is a pitch deck that I’m very happy with and that everyone I’ve shown it to seems to really like, which means I’m theoretically ready to start sending it to publishers 😨 (there’s a part of me that wishes there were still issues because the thought of actually sending things to publishers seems scary).

This upcoming week I’ll probably try to send out a handful of pitch submissions to get myself adjusted to the process. I’m not sure if I’ll make special slides for different publishers, but I’ll probably just reserve that for the publishers I’m particularly excited about. Beyond that, there’s some work I can do on the actual game as well, but there’s a decent chance that I’ll spend the majority of the week just sending out pitch submissions.