It’s been a long time since I felt that good about my game development journey. I’ve learned a bunch of newstuff in Unreal Engine and Dialogic/Godot over the last couple of weeks thatkeep me focused and motivated.

As I mentioned in my previous devlogs,I’m focusing on two projects to get myself accustomed to new engines and tech.

Let me give you a quick breakdown.

I’ll start with Rogue Shifters. Thisproject is basically a precursor in terms of learning and technology forParallel Pulse. I want to develop a full-blown visual novel in Dialogic,creating systems close to what I’m going to need for Parallel Pulse. Initially,I wanted to mimic the exact same approach by having multiple bubbles on thesame screen. It seems that making this type of setup would need a lot of codeimplementation, making things extremely hard for me to proceed with my game.The solution is simple, and I can pretty much do it with workarounds, havingonly one bubble at a time within the screen. It’s not what I wanted, but the difficulty levelincreases by X10 if I go with multiple bubbles. I probablyshouldn’t stress myself too much about it, and I have a lot of people tellingme they prefer only one bubble at a time because it’s easier to read. To myknowledge, the only engine capable of doing something like this efficiently is Ren’Py, which this year incorporated an easy bubble system.

Exploring Dialogue Bubble Presentation in Dialogic 2

In terms of assets, I have the basicposes for the two protagonists and the basic roster, but I’m missing a fewimportant ones. It’s not clear to me how I want them to be presented visually.That being said, I’m still polishing the assets, such as upscaling, cleaning,and outlining the characters. Also, I’m missing the majority of the backgroundimages, but I don’t see this being an issue since Idon’t have a lot of locations. When I wrote the script back in 2022, I wrote itwith economy in mind to save on assets. I’m a little bit concerned about theanimations since I’m not that familiar with tweens in Godot, but that’s why I’mmaking this project: an opportunity to learnthe engine and familiarize myself with Dialogic. I don’t have a clear timelinefor this one, but it could be ready in a few months if I focused myselfin it. A rough estimation for this one is Q1 of 2026.

This is a fairly ambitious soloproject since it’s the first time I’m making something as challenging as thisone. It includes making 3D models, levels, a combat system, and a dialoguesystem in Unreal. I’m trying to build my stack in anefficient way, so that I can build my next games usingthis one as a base. I’m surprised how manythings I’ve learned in the last couple of weeks, and what’s most important is that I encountered issues I would never have imagined, such asfinding proper animations, fixing fingers, and debugging the system. Thisproject motivates me the most right now because Ialways wanted to make games in Unreal Engine, especially 3D with a blend of 2dvisual novel style. I don’t have a timeline for this one either, and I’m not even sure if I’ll manage to finish it: level design is myweak point and dialogue systems in Unreal Engine can befairly complex, but similar to Rogue Shifters, this project aimsto help me learn the engine to make better games in the future.

Retargeting Animations from GASP

Objectively, the biggest issue I havewith this project is the lack of vision and direction. It’s not like I have aclear view of what I want to make, but I’m expanding based on what I can makeand what’s possible with my current level. For example, I started experimentingwith 2.5D environments to make a sidescrolleronly to realize this wouldn’t be possible given the lack of proper assets, letalone the complexity in terms of level design. The original idea was for theplayer to navigate the 2.5D levels in sidescroller mode, then have an RPGvisual novel style to interact with NPCs and get missions. I decided to changeit to a hack-and-slash arena game where you take on missions via a map, clearthe arenas, then interact in VN style with the rest of the character roster.This seems way more intuitive and fits the tone of the game. The reason I tookthis turn was because creating landscapes and materials in in full were easier to make given the existing pipeline.

To wrap things up, I finally feel likeI’m moving in the right direction again. Both Rogue Shifters and Edenfall areteaching me different things: one helps me refine mystorytelling and systems, the other pushes my technical limits in Unreal. It’snot about finishing them fast but about building the foundation I need for thegames I really want to make. For the first time in a while, I feel confidentthat every hour I put in brings me closer to that goal.