in the past i felt that making devlogs seemed to be more fun to do than the games themselves..
so here i go again  (you can check the previous devlog here and  here )

 im building on the engine from the previous 3D game
and it's like if someone entered with their very own version of
a cobbled together unity that never seem to work right..

but i got a secret weapon  my very own level editor
that i'm not about any close to master using
and which also never seem to work right..

..as an interesting new approach i decided to start with the assets:

anyway some screenshots:

Just a small update

devlog time!

also i found out animating eyes through code only is hard

Another day another dollar .. i mean devlog

Things seem to be slowly coming together
I'm shocked by this fact as this is not the way it usually goes..

anyway

Small update

added a new area
modelled, textured, animated the final boss..
and  realised i forgot to add sounds .. but too tired to deal with it now
*sigh* so close yet so far ..

Today I added some sounds and fixed some bugs.. 

and figured out some embarrassing bugs..

First the mouse look was going crazy
and i was baffled and couldn't find the cause
and turns out my thumb was over the laptop's touchpad

The second one,
and I'll try to get not too technical:

most of  the light in the game is through a lightmap
and to generate it i first need to unwrap the world
(seperate it into flat pieces and place them onto a square so they dont overlap)
and as the map got bigger the slower this part got
so i spent most of the day trying to optimise it

and long story short:
the problem was the loading bar updated after every triangle group
and there were about a thousand so it redraw the screen a thousand times

after changing it to only redraw about ten times max regardless of the number of groups
it was done nearly instantly

(also i was running it in debug mode)
(sigh.. im my own worst enemy)

but it's now optimised out the wazzoo so there is that

Oh well, some screenshot from the editor:

Take me down to the devlog

Added another area , made graphics for the ending
almost there, still need to fix bugs and polish..

for now some screenshots:

It's a fine day to devlog

First of all a title change, i found out there are many apps already out there called "Necrobox"
and.. well i'm not sure why i started calling this game that
(something necronomicon but should be silly something whatever)

so now it's..

Nekkrobox -- the long distance call of Chutulu

(also i'm glad i found out i'm not the only one
who kept misspelling Cthulhu as Chutulu
..stone off my hart.. )

anyway

here we are the part that i dread the most: testing

also a protip for all ya game developin amateur folk out there:
if you want to find bugs in your game just try to release it
all bugs  come out just right on release day

and i'm talking bugs nobody has seen before that
suddenly you can go through walls, the whole level explodes
metal soundtrack changes into country songs etc.
anything you can think of will go haywire on release day

oh well here are some solved ones:
if you remember the lightmap bug (from above)
I went back and forth through and through the code and..
turns out the sunlight radius was too small
and it didn't reach the surface..

And we have liftoff!

https://itch.io/embed/580448

Man, this page is starting to look like a myspace site ..

Phew..  so fixing stufff didn't took as much as time i thought it would ..  
here you go, people who check the boards now can play early ..

This calls for celebration!

Post release update

I'm finally done with the most difficult part so far: the trailer
(codecs are the true horror of our time)

Patch log (will this ever end?!)

I couldn't help myself and made a patch with some minor fixes:

So i thought of closing this up with a nice postmortem while i still remember most stuff

What went well? 
Compared to my previous 3D jam game : everything
so in the previous game the level looked horrible,
there was only one puzzle (which i thought was easy but people had a hard time figuring out)
and on top of it all due to a bug there was no sound at all
(but on my machine as I used absolute paths for testing)

But this time the colors and map turned out nicely,
people figured out the puzzles pretty fast
the idea of chutulu (sic) prank calls you was well received
and the sounds.. well.. worked

What went wrong?

 the difficulty
i was worried about making the game too hard
and even nerfed the last boss (way way too much)
so people went through the game like knife thru butter

in the end average gameplay time is 10 - 20 minutes
(which is not that bad in comparison to my old flash games
that had similar time and took a whole lot more effort to make)

the ending music

i found too late about that public domain is not  the same as it once was
the music in question is  "You Know What I Mean" by Al Bernard
which seemed perfect,  it was from the time period,
i liked it a lot, and most importantly it had nothing to do with lovecraft
and i also double checked that it was in the public domain

but alas

as i uploaded the trailer turns out that youtube auto demonetises it
with some (bogus nonsense) copyright claim
how you claim copy right for public domain stuff is beyond me
but i hear these  youtube anomalies are everyday now
anyway i never bothered to contest it
apologies to everyone who ran into it

revolver sound

  the revolver sound got a lot of complaints for being too weak
   strangely enough the wav file sounded fine enough  
    turns out i set the volume to be 60% of the original in code

Interesting stuff

  many people pointed out that the water splash sound is from minecraft
   but i remembered using the one from Klik & Play 
    and turns out it was a third one .. that i'm not sure where i got from
     oh well,   i guess all splash sounds are alike

there was a bug somehow nobody noticed:
i forgot to set a title of the map
so on the loading menu it just says "title"

and finally, some of the prank calls got a bit obscure
here are some explanations:

This one is pretty self explanatory:
"Is Mr Wall there?"
"No"
"Then may I ask what's holding up your house? "

Prince Albert was some sort of tobacco you could buy
apparently it came in a can
of course for my generation  Prince Albert  was a slang for ..
uhh.. something .. else..
making this call even weirder:

"Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"
"Yes"
"Well, you'd better let him out!"

"I see wetness in your future"
This was based on an anecdote about the man the legend the WOZ himself
allegedly he would call the telephone booth front of his dorm
and when someone picked up he would say
“This is Ramar the Mystic. I see wetness in your future"
and then he would throw a water balloon at them

"See you next crime..."

she is in Innsmouth

..

.. i got nothing

and finally
"I'm looking for Conflict-amphibians"
it was a battletoads reference and was cut from the game

..
i'll never forgive myself

i leave you with this