Updated daily

March.14/2025

• Went to the Tamagawa this morning to feed some pigeons. Also saw some crows and fed them some almonds. First contact with new friendship maybe?
• Worked on the drinking story bottle interactions. Most player inputs have now been converted to the Unity New Input System.
• Watched a documentary on Youtube about the intelligence of Ravens (Ravens - Intelligent Rascals of the Skies)

March.15/2025

• Led a walk with a group of 5 for my kizuna circle mindful walk workshop. We walked along the Zenpukuji River. Part of the workshop involved noticing sounds. What stood out to me were the crows and ravens. Deep cawing. Collective cawing.
• Worked on the drinking chapter ending sequence. Got a decent looking placeholder particle effect going. It’s just a stream of black. Later I want to make it look more like ink.
• Setting up Cinemachine is always weird. What’s the brain? What’s the virtual camera? Why does it work when I do it the wrong way? Anyways, finally got that hooked up to cameras.
• Watched the animated film Flow. There’s some good audio and visual inspiration in it.

March.16/2025

• Went to the same crow spot on the Tamagawa and fed a few crows some nuts.
• Watched the documentary ‘Birders: The Central Park Effect’.
• Worked on the purging particle effect and added some ink vfx. Still needs more fine tuning, but it’s good enough for now. This sequence will have a lot of blur, so I can probably get away with it looking a bit janky.

March.17/2025

• Watched ‘kill gameplay’ rant by droqen on Youtube this morning. It was a good reminder about why I don’t like to focus on gameplay and loops. Made me rant a bit on bluesky too.
• Cleaned up and organized the projects assets folder.
• Cut out some more bird images from the Japanese bird encyclopedia book I bought at a Book Off. I find it relaxing to do. Eventually I’ll put them all around my desk to keep me inspired and surrounded my birds.

March.18/2025

• Fed some more crows at the river. A group of pigeons came too. And then a huge group of bird watchers. This really is the bird spot in the city.
• Added a bird flock feature to the game. I can customize the prefab, size, direction, avoidance and speed. Very easy way to add a range of dynamic environmental details. Now I just need to wait for a sale on the 50 bird assets I want to buy so I can really make good use of this script.
• Added some butterfly particle effects to the plant story ending.
• I’m at a small creative block on the story. There are two ways I want to tell it. Linear vs Non-Linear. For now, I’ll focus on the technical framework to make each of these methods possible. I’ll need to team up more closely with the writer and get inspiration to fully realize the narrative structure.

March.19/2025

• Public holiday on Thursday so I went out to support my friend at a music event. He was VJing for a butoh dancer group. Butoh dance in some form is part of the visuals I want to add to this, so nice to see some live inspiration.
• Coming home at 6am and seeing the early morning sky is stunning. There’s a stillness in the atmosphere. The hustle of the day hasn’t begun. It’s just sky and you. I’ll need to curate some good skyboxes and volumetrics eventually. I have countless pictures of skies for inspiration.

March.20/2025

• There were a large group of crows at the river today. I guess they know this is the place to get some quality food. I went there during the golden hour and it was serene. Mind completely in the present.
• Cleaned up the audio assets folder and made some adjustments to the whale dream sequence.
• Noticed that there is a consistent frame stutter every 10 seconds. Profiler spits out a bunch of information I don’t understand. 100MB .txt file?!

March.21/2025

• Not too many crows today. But there were two that I fed that also followed me home a bit. The walk this morning was nice. Had a chance to talk about the story and narrative structure. We have a plan. We just need to experiment with how it all fits together in practice.

March.22/2025

• Went on a long river walk. Always blown away with the amount of diversity in flora and fauna. There are spots on the Tamagawa that feel like your own private space to think and reflect. Spent a lot of time oberserving bird behaviour.
• Preparing for a long walk tomorrow with my Kizuna Mindful Walking Circle. We’re going to a bird park, and I’ve prepared some activities to help notice and listen to birds. This is all a good excuse for me to do a lot of bird research.

March.23/2025

• Spent the morning at Tokyo Port Bird Park. Saw lots of birds. Led a walk. Took notes on a lot of interesting bird behaviour.
• Went on another long walk near the Tamagawa in the late afternoon. Realizing that these walks are one of the most important aspects to developing TO:RI.

March.24/2025

• Added stationary gliding behaviour. I can choose a bird prefab and have it glide naturally in one spot. Inspired by watching sparrowhawks on the Tamagawa
• Went to a friends place to make sandwiches and talk about our relationship to games. He runs bi-weekly discussion groups on various topics. Group of 6 of us. This discussion was structured like a conversational dice game. It was a lovely time.

March.25/2025

• Early morning walk to the Tamagawa. More crows. They seem to just sit in a nearby tree and wait until I leave before they start eating the nuts. Understandable.
• Worked on the Paint Story. Item interactions all hooked up properly. Even worked a bit on the ending sequence for this chapter.
• Added flock behaviour that follows the mouse. I’m really looking forward to polishing up this ending. I have the vision in my head, but I think creating a mood board for this (and all other endings) would be a good idea. I’m thinking this will be the chapter to use for a demo.

March.26/2025

• Worked on the Paint Story ending more and implemented the brush stroke controller. Will probably polish this whole chapter a bit more than I usually would at this point in development. Seems like a good demo piece with a lot of visual spectacle and fun interaction.
• Getting annoyed with this frame stutter every 10 seconds. Not sure if it’s an editor thing or in the build. I guess this is a good time to start integrating continuous automated builds.
• Bird emoji cursor added to blog 🐦

March.27/2025

• Gave a presentation about TO:RI at a Tokyo Game Bridge event https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FdNOIQBas3iJPORDAoPLtHCGExrc1eWWC_qS6mHHfkc/edit?usp=sharing. I kept it brief, giving a quick overview of myself, the game, its structure, and two videos, a shorter 1 minute trailer and development compilation. https://youtu.be/QFjHhKfDIvQ. I’ve talked about this project at gæmz Tokyo so many times now that giving a presentation in a larger crowd didn’t make me that nervous.

March.28/2025

• Went to a live show at Hako Gallery in Yoyogi-Uehara. It was mix or electric guitar, noise, sound art, and ethereal vocals. Felt really inspired by the noise and distorted, modulated strings. A few chapters already make use of noise and broken string samples. Can’t wait to fully flesh out the sound and music.

March.29/2025

• Worked on the Fire Dream. Surprised how good I got it to look without too much effort. Reused a lot of assets from Solastalgia. Still need to add a heat distortion effect and flickering point lights.

March.30/2025

• Made some changes to the important objects highlight. Objects have a faint permanent outline and a bigger outline width when looking at it. I kinda dislike it because it feels a bit hand holdy and makes the world feel less natural, but it might be necessary. Need to playtest with it off and on. Ideally good environment design, and lighting should replace this, but I’m probably overthinking it.
• Starting to think about the main character design more. Their race, background, gender, hair, clothes, tattoos, etc. I’m not skilled enough to make an original 3D character so this is possibly an expensive commission/contract job. A bit early to think about this fully, but I’ve started a mood board for their design.

March.31/2025

• Organized the naming structure for objects in the scene hierarchy. It’s tedious but makes things way more readable and easy to find. Example: PG_EFX_Butterflies which means a particle/vfx in the Pigeon chapter named Butterflies. I have prefixes for all chapters and object types. Before things had names like butterfly(1), scriptthatdoesthis, canvas1, canvas_2 etc.