Gutter Dev Log

Signal & Receiver Interfaces

5/7/2025

- An hour and a half yesterday night + some other unknown amount of hours some day last week
- Made a Streetlight BP, because I wanted to start making a number of "blockout prefabs" to better dress the LD as placeholders for proper assets (better visualize the intended context of the environment). In addition to THIS specifically being a test to turn something on and off with the Switch BP.
- Added Signal and Receiver interfaces to attach to any BP objects like the Switch and Streetlight objects. So I can systemically link them and then be able to modularly assign them as a level designer. This along with my "Interactable" interface being usable with the item selection system, will fill the LD with more LD object-based interactivity possibilities.

Back to Refactoring

3/19/2025

Several hours of work each night for three nights last week
Its almost been a year, worked on a LOT of Godot projects in the mean time. Some posted progress on youtube, some not. Also a game jam! Decided to come back to Gutter and scale back a lot of my headier game design ideas and refactor to make basic systems cleaner and ideally pivot back into LD again soon after hitting a basic gameplay system core loop benchmark.
Replaced wonky "OtherWorldly Perception" respawn system with a basic opt-in checkpoint respawn.
Dug into interact / item interaction system, gutted, and replaced with blueprints now utilizing an interface based system. While slowly replacing previous BP objects with new versions coded to use the interface across them all.
Started with Door, then spent a lot of time getting the Knife->Dagger to work in all the basic ways I'd like without bugging out.
Also I made a basic detection of if the player is "falling" to make a sound on impact that will alert enemies.

Tiny Incremental Blocking

6/17/2024

Another 3 hours while dev streaming - though 90% of which was sabotaged by a micro-internet celebrity's appearance and subsequent multiple-hour conversing with me on a variety of game industry topics. (also dnd and being a creative receiving feedback online)
A small bit of continued city buildings grayboxing.

Concept Sketch and Blocking

6/13/2024

3 hours roughly
Took some notes on the rough ideas for points of interest and / or the intent of different areas which would make up the map. Then ended up trying to do a basic sketch of the different areas and general placements of those potential PoIs. As usual, I definitely took too much time in paint making said sketch.
That said I think its a moderately detailed jumping off point for the proper first draft for a blocky. Also drew some lines it indicate potential options for player paths and draw out my intended elevation changes for the level foundations. As well I made a bit of progress on setting said foundations in the block out. Ideally will focus just on blocking next time and will have a first draft I can then test and iterate on from a 3D playable and not a 2D sketch.

City Port LD

6/11/2024

3 hours - half of which involved me talking to twitch chatters as I tried dev streaming for the first time in a while
Begun work on a new to ideally feature eventually as a LD portfolio piece for Gutter's first person stealth gameplay. Very introductory work laying out the rough scale and organizing the hierarchy. Made a handful of "prefab" exterior city buildings scales and examples of interiors. Made a few more variant textures for said buildings and an overhead light blueprint for said interiors.

Crazy amounts of work I didn't document from 6 or so months ago.

6/6/2024

Like many weeks of during this past December and January I think.
Enemy alert states changed based off an unreal behavior tree and tasks, hearing and sight perception of based off the players body line of sight, footstep volume levels, and distance.
Player sprint, crouch, footsteps, and clean transitions between each state without breaking (it kept breaking a lot because of the transitions between each other)
Player health and death animation. Default timed respawn. Basic player attack and stealth kill.
Quest / Mission UI text for objectives and quest volume BPs that change / progress said text.
Baby's first level designs to test enemy AI, pathfinding, patrol routes, and getting a feel for the player's gameplay for core loop.
An iteration on the level design to feel more like a guarded place with multiple paths in and out. Plus a variety of alternate paths with the OWP that aren't showcased because I later changed how OWP works before recording these videos lol
"Dynamic LD" through OWP transitions showcases simply and the OWP respawn system that requires juice from the purple meter to ENTER the OWP and then unlock respawn points to be used later when downed. After downed, you must navigate back to a previously unlocked OWP to reenter the world. Losing purple juice the longer you're in the OWP.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was more, but this was all mostly made a while ago before I doubled down on learning Godot in my spare time. I'm reviving it now though so I have a gameplay template to greybox level designs as any meaningful portfolio to show to employers because I need a job now.
I uploaded like 10 new videos click the playlist link to see them all.

>>> Gutter Dev Video Playlist <<<

Programmer Aids Me off Enum Wall

11/9/2023

1.5 Hour
Programmer friend helped walk me through the bit I was missing from the tutorial skip-over. Effectively just that I needed to reference the interface my custom enum was held in as ITS event as instead of the custom one I made in the pawn. Blah Blah Blah. That got me over that one hump, that most importantly just let me set the enemy's alert state FROM the behavior tree.
Got a little ahead of myself trying to determine logic for differing states of alertness based off how long the player had been perceived. That hole involved him then trying to explain services to me and I spent too long trying to troubleshoot why my perception components weren't detecting me consistently. Tired brain won out and I decided I'll pick up the rest of the tutorial later and then find next steps.

Dicked around in Scripting AI

10/24/2023

3 hours and 45 minutes
Had the dumb thought of "Let me make a basic enemy collide with player to damage and then red UI feedback" before playing some video games tonight. Made the collision and then figured there should be a basic "walk to player function".
Implemented a basic walk-to-player function within like 30 minutes of the first youtube tuto I found. Though because its brushed against Behavior Trees (something Ive always known I needed to learn), I clicked on this video and got sucked into actually trying to learn while also building a more robust AI for my enemy.... Got about halfway through before catching on not knowing what the Enum variable was (which I figured out?), but then getting lost in an information gap with the video skipping through steps with C U T S. Just show me how you did each step please T.T Maybe I could figure it out if it wasnt so late. Maybe Ill ask programmer friends tomorrow or just delete half of it and use what I got working (likely more than I needed anyway). RIP playing video games, yay micro incremental learning.

LD Block Toggle Scripting

10/24/2023

like 2.5 hours I think
Did some baby LD noodling by making an interior with a door and window in the metric level yesterday. Satisfying but climbing up and down it didn't feel like gameplay without enemies/stealth, and sadly I'm a little fearful for my motivation if I dick around in scripting AI right now.
So my shower thoughts told me to implement a high story concept in-world Gutter system, "Otherworldly Perception" (OWP). Which essentially is just the dynamic LD of the clockwork mansion or time travel levels of DH2, but way less complicated. Its a system to toggle different environment assets in and out of existence (visibility and collision).
There's probably way more gameplay-feel changes that would come with this, but for now I prototyped just the function to tag actors in a level and then with Level Blueprint scripts can toggle them in and out of "existence" yay.
Also Weebly was broken and not loading last night so I typed this now and will just post tomorrow when it's hopefully not broken.

Metrics and Colored Blocks

10/22/2023

An hour and a half yesterday and then I think an hour two nights before that.
In efforts kick-start LD, managed to rip away from other functions and disconnect all the item function. PLUS watched some LD Design bits on the internet that reminded me it'd be worth setting hard metrics in-mind. I basically already did with the provided grid blocks but wanted more precision.
So first I made a level map for metrics, just for measuring the player's capability, and then measured the upper and lower bounds for each climb function. From left to right, step over, fast climb, normal climb, jump to reach and then slow climb, and last unreachable for climbing height.
There was an issue with the lowest climbing where above 0.45m you didnt step up, but also below 0.75m the climb function didnt reach it so player would just jump and kind awkwardly trip forward. So most of yesterday was noodling around with BPs and numbers to fix that, Now the player discreetly either steps up or fast climbs.
Last thing was I made colored versions of the grid materials. Better motivation for building an environment meant to look like something (A grimy port-town alley, street, and coast). Though and/or clearly signpost things like different highest of ledges with different accessibility aye.

<<Previous

Gutter Dev Log

Signal & Receiver Interfaces

Back to Refactoring

Tiny Incremental Blocking

Concept Sketch and Blocking

City Port LD

Crazy amounts of work I didn't document from 6 or so months ago.

Programmer Aids Me off Enum Wall

Dicked around in Scripting AI

LD Block Toggle Scripting

Metrics and Colored Blocks

Pitch

Goal

Timeline

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