7/5/25

"Where have YOU been?!"

Okay! So it has been quite a while since the last devlog...almost 8 months. Honestly, I've been occupied with personal stuff and figuring out some things on my end. Not only that, but I was also mainly focused on another project (making Life and Solitude) and I wanted to knock that out before fully committing on ABADDON. I also upgraded to a new laptop!! Yeah, the old one was beginning to show some wear and tear...I had it since 2019, so I figured it was time to move on. Thankfully, my dad helped me sell my old car and I used the money to get my new laptop!

So! That was pretty much what I was up to. I'll catch you up on what's new, there's quite a bit.

Weapon Pickup

I thought it would be a nice simple way to ease back into the devlog saga by showing off the weapon pickup mechanic, as well as the equip animation. It doesn't seem like a whole lot, but the process was a bit complex to get it working (at least it was complex for me). I ran into a few issues with getting the pick up item to work with the game data. One of the more problematic ones being the axe disappearing when you load the game after picking it up. After some troubleshooting and experimenting, I eventually created a middle-man script that made it easier to implement and run those checks much smoother. I've messed around with both the axe and one other weapon. I like how it turned out.

House Glow-up

As you were able to see in the clip, yeah! The house looks less empty now! I originally didn't plan to fix it up, but I ran into a bit of a problem when I began switching gears to implement the combat system. Bear with me, but before I start building the combat, I want to revamp the weapons slightly...not much just in a way where you could see Abel's hands. And in order for me to do that, I would have to model and rig them in Blender - not to mention finish modeling the Follower enemy as well as a remake of Abel himself. You might be wondering "Okay? what's the problem then??" And well...Blender kinda intimidates me. 

I don't have a lot of experience or confidence using Blender and doing 3D models (not nearly as much as drawing and music), so the prospect of modeling stuff puts me off and makes me want to avoid it. So I figured I would start practicing and getting used to modeling by making some furniture and decor. After a while, I was beginning to enjoy it a bit! It was weird at first to get the scaling right, but luckily I was able to export the level from Unity to Blender and modeled the furniture and stuff around that. It's a bit of an odd method, I think? It seems mostly common to model the level in Blender first and then move it to Unity, but I won't worry too much about it for now. This seems to work just fine for me.

Placeholder Blocks

You also might've noticed some white blocks here and there in the living room, kitchen and bedroom of the house. Those are just placeholders for the rest of the furniture for later. I wanted to simply block up a rough scale and placement of the furniture to not make the house look super duper empty. Now that I've gotten a good handle of modeling, I figured I would worry about those at a later time. I want my game to function well first before making it prettier, y'know?

Next Devlog???

Okay! So for the next devlog, I'll likely revisit the dodging mechanic. I didn't show it or mention it here, but I slightly reworked the dodging a bit. Aside from that, I'm going to keep modeling; finish up the Follower model and finish sketching references for the new Abel model (which I will use to extract the arms for the new weapon viewmodel and stuff). 

This will most likely take me a little while before I finally start working on the combat system. Once everything is set in place, things will get a lot more fun. Gahhhh! I can't wait, man.