Enjoy these Blendo dev posts
During the Steam Summer Sale, we went nuts with Skin Deep Promotion. We now have a tiktok account under the name "Blendo Games", and Brendon designed a bunch of papercraft cats.
During the sale, however, Brendon also wrote a bunch of developer commentary style blog posts about decisions we made while making this game in idTech 4, the Doom 3 engine. You should check them out - they are all very short, concise reads!
- Skin Deep Storyboards - how we assembled narrative sequences in Skin Deep using a storyboarding process
- Skin Deep Art Density - how Brendon, Tynan, and Suzanne made decisions about the visual complexity of spaces in Skin Deep
- Skin Deep Enemy Brains - what systems we used to control enemy behavior in Skin Deep, how this affected the stealth system, how it realized their personalities, and more.
- Skin Deep Map Kit - a kit which contains a lot of the things we use in Skin Deep levels, like door and window assemblies, our prop zoo, and more. Very useful if you want to make working levels in Skin Deep as quickly as possible.
- Skin Deep Source Code - the game's source code!
Brendon also wrote a bunch of posts earlier this year about the suite of development tools he made to handle common tasks on the project (in particular, tasks associated with my narrative work managing strings and VO files). Here they are:
- Skin Deep Stresstester - a tool used to QA levels by automatically "playing the game" and starting/restarting levels
- Skin Deep Localizer - a tool which allowed me to load a .csv and automatically generate and check-in the changed localization files for the game. This is how I updated the game to include new English lines as well. You can also use this tool to search all text in the game. I can do this just as easily in the .csv, but sometimes you want to search what's actually set up in the game to diagnose a bug. It also allowed developers to search the game's text without touching my live Google Sheets string tables.
- Skin Deep Build Packager - a one-button tool which creates a new build of the game for Steam. A common tool, but we had our own, and this is it!
- Skin Deep Build Machine - a simpler one-button tool which just fetches new changes and creates a new build of the game on-demand. It basically automates some clicks.
- Blendo Wav Tool - a really cool application which makes all the audio files in the game browsable. You can search by filename, too. The tool also searches for common problems in audio files, like silence which should have been cut.
Buy Skin Deep!!! Thank you!!