April.1/2025

• Renamed and organized objects for the Plant chapter. I think for the next week I’ll be doing this for all chapters. I figure this is going to be extra valuable if I end up collaborating on the project with more people.

April.2/2025

• Renamed and organized objects for the Drinking chapter.

April.3/2025

• Renamed and organized objects for the Intro, Crane, and Painting chapters.
• Added some walking animations to the third person view sections. Looks good enough for trailer making. Third person controller still needs a lot of work.
• Added some more effects to the ending of the Drinking chapter. Birds fly out of your mouth now. It looks really good.
• Weather has been bad this week. Missing the river walks and the birds, but things are looking better tomorrow and the weekend. WIll be spending a lot of time outdoors.

April.7/2025

• The weather has been so beautiful. Spending a lot of time outdoors and going on long aimless walks. One of these walks helped me solve some creative challenges and I found so much inspiration from a rooftop sunset and a woman with long white hair riding a bike - her hair flowing endlessly in the wind.
• A bird landed on a pile of cherry blossom petals which caused them to burst up into the air. Added to the atmosphere notes.
• Created a new gameplay trailer with some rigged animations. I’ll be showing this at a private online event and talking about game dev. Weirdly not nervous at all.

April.8/2025

• Doing research into inverse kinematics. This is a new topic for me. Animations in Unity used to scare me, but I’m feeling more comfortable with it after making The Light Of Our Yearning.

April.9/2025

• Preparing for a talk tomorrow morning for a Twitch Guild community event. I’ll talk about TO:RI and just general game dev stuff. Events like this are great because it forces me to prepare updated videos and talking points. Also a good oppurtunity to connect with like-minded people.

April.10/2025

• Talk went really well. It was less about TO:RI and more about my experience making games. Talked about how we define success, why the game industry is not a healthy place, creavivity and passion, and I gave a lot of tips on how to get started making your own personal and unique game.
• Added a washi paper overlay to the ending of the painting chapter. I think it looks great and makes it feel visually distinct.

April.11/2025

• Volumetric URP clouds have been added to the game. Shocked how easy it was to setup. It adds a ton of new creative variables to the game. There are a lot of ways I can use this to create dramatic or melancholic atmospheres. I have a feeling it runs badly on lower end hardware, but it’s also so easy to toggle on and off without affecting anything else. I will probably make heavy use of it in the plant chapter when the storm is growing.

April.12/2025

• Bought the Horse Animator Pro (HAP) asset. It’s the first big asset purchased I made for this project. I spent most of the day trying to get it to work. Turns out that having domain reloading on stops all input from being recognized. Have to turn it back on. Goodbye instant play mode.
• HAP functions great and has a lot of features, but I’ve learned that the animations aren’t really that realistic and many horse gamers can recognize when the animations are poorly done. I’d rather not just accept what’s out of the box. I’ll attempt to give it some extra polish later into development. For now, this is a solid character controller.

April.13/2025

• Worked on paint chapter ending. Added colors to the ink strokes.

April.14/2025

• More work on the ink controller. It’s a lot of fun. I have a lot of plans for this sequence. More birds. Ink dripping effect

April.16/2025

• Went to Tokyo Indies. Didn’t show TO:RI, but I did show an intentionally bad project I made in an hour, and it got a lot of laughs. Met someone there that regognized my game at a talk I gave, and he gave me some technical graphical tips for color. Something to do with global illumination? I was a bit confused, but worth asking about further.

April.17/2025

• First time in a while that I’ve started to feel a hint of burnout. It’s the constant chatter of multiple projects, events, and deadlines living in my head. I may have taken on too much this month. I need to slow down. It’s good to recognize this early before it gets to an unhealthy state.

April.21/2025

• Haven’t opened TO:RI in about a week. I did open Unity3D briefly to make a shitpost idea my friend sent me. Small but much needed distraction. Last week I also took a painting class. Giving myself some outlets to be creativily messy while also finishing something. I find that taking some creative breaks with other low stakes creative stuff helps keep the feelings of burnout away.

April.30/2025

• Another month gone by. Slowed down a bit, but good progress still. Volumetric clouds, horse controller, chapter ending gameplay and vfx updates. Also recently added some new workflow assets for the inspector and assets folder. Looks extremely organized and easy to navigate. I should start doing monthly longer form blog posts. I find that writing has been a good semi regular habit that helps a lot to track progress and just free my mind a little after a hectic day.