Log entry: day 34
In the morning the forty students at their desks stopped being mannequins. Now they're living bodies, and they can stand up. Pull a chair out, and the student stands up and sits down again.
By lunch there was a break. At the bell they get up one by one, each with their own delay, like in Bully. Desk mates chat, someone heads to the toilet. Forty bodies going through the school at once found the holes in walking right away: a kid getting up from a desk ended up on top of the desk, and the bench in the corridor sat people facing the wall.
I played and sent nine points. For example: "Sat down on a chair and just sat there, and then bam: you got taken to the deputy head… and after the scene I was back in the same spot." We settled it like this: wherever you sat, that's your seat. And also: "it's boring that a character just walks out and stands there. At least let them strike different goofy poses… Kids standing alone are creepy." Now at break they stand in pairs and in poses.
One student from 1A stood in a locked pump room until the end of the day. There was no way in: no holes in the walls, no path. A recording caught the moment: the crowd in the doorway pressed him into the wall. We didn't fix the crush, we put up a net: anyone who hasn't reached their desk within 45 seconds of the lesson goes back to it on their own.
The flight engineer wanted to move latecomers to their desks while nobody was looking, the way big games do it. I said: "that happens in real life, keep it simple." Late is late.
In the evening I wrote the most important thing of the week: "the best fun is when you throw a napkin at a person and they fly far, far away. That level of absurd is what I like." The flight engineer checked and found there was no flying person in the code at all. The wad of napkin itself flew off, and a person only flew by accident, if they stepped on it. Now it's all on purpose: the lighter the thing, the farther the person flies. A flying person knocks down whoever's in the way, like bowling pins.
Before that, every thrown thing got the same push, and thirty grams of napkin left at almost 70 meters per second. Now the wad shoves a person harder than a candy bar does, and a ball or a chair only push. A flying person passes three quarters of their speed to the one they hit, and the chain dies out by itself.
The QUIET ZONE and PLAY ZONE signs went up on the walls at 20:43 and came down at 22:17. They did no good at all.
Log entry: day 35
A day of freedom outside missions. In the morning the flight engineer worked through my list: a wet floor became an ice rink, the bike got a ramp, the snack machine gives in to whoever shakes it longest. A piper appeared: to the drum, the students dance and walk in single file. A chair on wheels. A ball, about which I wrote: "kick a ball at break and everyone runs after it like pigeons after bread, and you get a big pile-up."
And the skeleton at a desk. My idea: "skeleton at a desk: put it in your seat, and the teacher calls the skeleton up to the board. Hahaha, do it."
The teacher calls the skeleton up if it's out of its usual place and standing at a desk. Without the first condition she called it up in the very first lesson: the 1A skeleton already stands by the back desk. The very first check caught that.
Also twenty "secrets" around the school, our version of the hidden packages in GTA. A piece of glass with a candy wrapper under it, like when we were kids.
The game finds spots for the secrets by itself and checks them with a ray. Before that check existed, a secret would land on a boulder, on the little bridge, and once it slid through a wall into the restroom.
Freedom outside missions
The backpack got redone twice in half an hour. The first came out too real. I wrote: "simplify the backpack. Make it out of rounded primitives or something. Don't make it like a real one. We need to keep to the game's style, one that fits the characters." It became nine rounded boxes.
And in the evening it came to the porch: "the school's entrance needs redoing. It's a nightmare. I mean the porch. And the darn bike was stabbing right into the rack there." The porch stood higher than the school floor, and the wide door looked squat. Now the entrance has no steps, with a portal and a sign.
Log entry: day 36
Forty living bodies at break ate the frame. The flight engineer measured it: fidgeting, walking and skeleton rigs together cost more than the whole frame at 60 frames per second. And even the students behind the player's back counted. Now whoever's out of frame doesn't count.
In the evening there were 73 students instead of forty. The ones far away, out of frame and with nothing to do were put to sleep, like crowds in GTA and Hitman. Seventy-three with sleep cost the frame less than forty without it.
We also found a check that went through the whole school every frame. A third of the frame went into finding one class register.
And the school loaded from file didn't match the one assembled on the spot. It had 4,300 extra nodes: blackboards, pencil sharpeners, sinks and clothes came in doubles. All fifteen padlocks went missing. And a deleted stall came back next to a fresh one, which made 84 stalls instead of 42.
Log entry: day 37
Over the morning loading went from 33 seconds down to five. Twenty-four of those seconds went into 1,325 lamps that were switched off anyway.
I wrote: "the lighting in the toilet is seriously weird". The flight engineer found its own mistake: a hidden light had lost its shadows, and it started shining through walls.
In the evening the rooms got cartoon lighting: a warm side, a blue shadow, a bright rim. The first try didn't convince me, I "didn't find any fundamental difference" and sent a reference of someone else's shader. After the second I wrote: "I like how it is in the game now".
Log entry: day 38
The yard got redone: a sky with clouds from my sketch, a lawn in brushstrokes, a pond, stone paths from my reference. And for the first time the game got recorded sounds: wind, birds, leaves in the gusts. Before that every sound was computed from formulas.
The yard from references
In the afternoon I put into words what I want from the game: "when I played GTA I didn't think about the game's big goal, I just did missions and wandered around the city, enjoying the freedom." That's how the demo got its direction: freedom, missions, wanted level. In one line: a sandbox school where any chaos becomes a miracle if nobody saw you. Six stages.
Stage one: the "Watchers" meter. I asked for one thing: "the main thing is for it to be at 'zero', that'll be the signal that you can make mischief."
In the evening I asked: "Does the bike even have physics? Like gravity and all that, like the chair." It turned out it didn't. Code worked out where the bike was, and that afternoon two patches had already been stuck onto that calculation: so a bike dropped mid-jump would land on the ground, and so it would stand on a slope. That same evening the bike became a real body weighing 12 kilograms, and later it and the skateboard got a shared class.
Log entry: day 39
We needed a deputy head who gives chase. I wrote: "The deputy head. Make it a duck! We already have a 'cat' character, after all. The duck should be made in the same style." And I asked for music, "cheerful, like Benny Hill". The flight engineer composed its own tune, and we didn't borrow anyone else's.
At 4:19 in the morning a duck in a suit with a red tie appeared.
On the first try the duck ran looking at the door of its office and didn't see the kid right in front of it. Fixed. Then I asked: "but what's the payoff… develop the chase… places to hide… have the janitor chase me too. Keep working on it." Now the janitor gives chase along with the duck, and you can hide in a locker, in a stall, in a crowd.
In the afternoon there was a conversation that changed how we make the whole game. I'd found a prompt that advises building all the geometry in Blender with scripts, out of primitives and curves. And I asked the flight engineer whether it really does 3D better in Blender than in Godot. It turned out it had already been doing just that since September 18: every thing has its own Blender script.
Then I asked about animation. It seemed to me Blender could do more, there are even plugins like Auto-Rig Pro. And smooth, fluid movement matters a great deal to me, and we hadn't always been good at it. I suggested: "how about we take the janitor and practice on him… we need fluid walking, jumping, running, head turns and mopping a wet floor." And at rest I wanted him to "stand and bob down a little, like old Disney cartoon characters".
The flight engineer didn't move anything by hand. It wrote the principles of animation down as numbers: at the bottom of a step the body squashes, on the way up it stretches, the arms and head lag a little, the torso counters the hips. Blender works out the motion from those numbers by itself. An hour and a half later I watched the first clip and wrote: "wow! The animation is a hundred times better than what we made in Godot! Awesome! Keep going!"
That same day a rule appeared: any new thing we first show as variants in Blender renders, and only the chosen one goes into the game. The first to go through it was the trash bin in the yard.
Variants first
I accepted the station, but "the orange color hurts my eyes". For plastic we compared three yellows. Under our sun, matte gold and rye drift into orange, and only pale straw reads as yellow.
While we were moving the walk over to Blender, I was the one who asked to slow it down to a natural pace. Forty minutes later I wrote: "somehow the player started walking slowly after our reconstruction." The player's kid got a jog, twice as fast as a natural pace.
A playtest of the opening gave nine notes. One: "the deputy head shows up out of nowhere in a chase. Literally out of thin air. He should have his own office with a duck sign on it." Now the office exists. I had the belief meter with percentages next to the task removed: "Just rip it out." There was also a secret passage through a vent grille and an end to the demo with the question "What was the most fun?".
The flight engineer likes to give check files Russian names. I wrote: "it scares me that you're creating files in Cyrillic." Over the week thirteen such checks piled up, and one of them appeared after my remark.
Log entry: day 40
"You can't get away from the running deputy head. He runs at the same speed." The duck and the janitor were slowed down by ten percent.
A chair holds a door again. This fix was written on September 19 and 20, and both times it never made it to the main branch. Features vanish if nobody guards them.
In the afternoon the school got three staircases from Blender and the second floor of the classroom block, 44 rooms. I suggested making the whole building in Blender: "if our school as a building (to me it's like the game's map) were made in Blender, the quality of all the geometry would be better." For now we agreed otherwise: Blender draws, the plan decides. Meanwhile the oak's crown poked into the second floor, so it was trimmed back.
We found a funny hole: whoever stepped off the edge of the ground fell forever, the game saved that fall, and the next launch started with it. Now the game can't be broken.
In the evening we wrote down the philosophy: the spirit of GTA III and San Andreas. And the main rule, which I put like this: "Classmates applauding because you threw a napkin at someone and they flew off, we can't allow that. I don't want to raise kids on that, even in a game. But emotions need an outlet too." People are not targets.
And the last line of the week was a question: "Maybe the ghost isn't the story we need?"
Where it came from
GTA: freedom outside missions, "secrets" instead of hidden packages, the wanted level turned into a chase. The prompt I found about geometry in Blender, after which animation moved there too. Bully: a bell that each student answers on their own. Goose Game. Benny Hill for the chase music. The janitor at rest bounces like old Disney characters. The yard sounds come from a ready-made Ovani pack.
The week in numbers
- 147commits
- 40 → 73living students in one day
- 33 → 5 sto load the school
- 1,325switched-off lamps slowing down loading
- 32 hoursfor the six stages of the demo
- 13checks with Russian file names