Week of May 1, 2011

No bullet point parade this week. Don’t worry, I’m already self-flaggelating as punishment.
I figured it would be okay if I took a short break after all my exams were done. I still did a few things for the game, because that’s naturally where my mind goes. But I thought, you know, a few days where I relaxed and played some other games, get away from my own, would do me some good.

Day 2, my computer shat itself, and wouldn’t boot up anymore.

So, while that’s getting fixed, I’m starting to re-evaluate my way of working. I’ve realized that my method has been fairly short-sighted, focused on making small, incremental changes, without having a good long-term plan. So, this week, I’ve been starting to put together an overarching plan for the game, particularly for the first iteration that’ll be released come January.

Oh, and Megatronica is safe and sound, even if I somehow lose all the data on that machine. Incidentally, I’d like to take this time to announce my love and intense, passionate lust for the developers of Dropbox. If you are a developer for Dropbox and wish me to pay homage to your genitals, please, do not hesitate to get in touch.

Anyway. I’m now doing a small, self-contained story that the player can access in the actual game, through a virtual reality thingy already included in the library in the main ‘hub’. Yes, it’s a game within a game, so you can game while you game. The story I’m doing now will help flesh out the setting, and develop one of the main characters of the overarching plot.

One bit of advice typically given to indie developers is to ‘start small’. I don’t do that too well. I’m doing this self-contained story only because:
a) It’s fantastic demo material, ensuring there will be at least something to play soon.
b) It teaches me to look ahead, and to develop the process for, well, the rest of the game
c) It allows me to focus on a small portion of the game’s overworld, which will be present in both this self-contained story, and the main game. It’s going to be one, big, seamless world, which is pretty intimidating. Being able to deal with only a small slice of it for now is comforting.
d) Looks like I’ll finally be making some goddamn assets.
e) It’s making me branch out and deal with all the things I never thought I’d be doing at this stage, and have therefore neglected.

Okay, so as for actual work/progress being done? The script is 6,000 words already. That’s like one-tenth of a novel. And that’s just the dialogue. Go me.

I also started revising the collision detection. While sprucing up combat, things started to get faster and more precise. Things also started getting stuck in walls, which should never happen ever, for risk of breaking the game completely. It’s okay now, though, and I’ve set up a method (for when I can get back to the code) to make it airtight.

God, that was boring.
Should be a good bullet point parade next week. I’ll hold myself to that.