Took another pass at this, and made a binch of thums and eventually came up with perspective I liked.
Then I tossed into the perspective view maker http://drakkheim.com/perspective/grid.php?image=2a811acb319a27b462e6185e36aa491d.png&save=2 and saved out some guides.
Then a little bit of time blocking out some of the shapes and it’s something I’m beginning to think works.
But now it’s time for some holiday cheer so perhaps things will be a bit slow for a while.
The time to do this game has come. So it’s gonna be done right. No more Torque2D, Slick, or other homegrown from the ground, unproven frameworks. Time to do it in something that’s got support, community, a track record and a workflow. Aka Unity. And while we’re at it, let’s make it 3D, physics enabled and extensible by the user to add new rooms to the pool of maze chambers.
And let’s do it as part of this year’s OneGameAMonth Challenge to keep focused.
Oh and a list… let’s do a milestone list:
Ok kinda scatterbrained right now so, let’s just get back into the blogging spirit with a short list of accomplishments:
Had to rethink some mechanics.. but the controls feel SO much better now.
The actual performance of the dive and flap buttons are undergoing constant tweaking, but the sense of control is coming along superbly.
Screen scaling is working.. but the size isn’t right on smaller screens. I need to re-write the system to always maintain a specific horizontal distance and let it just create blue sky on top of the world for the extra space. BUT IT WORKS..
The game is working on Android 2.3 (HTC MyTouch) all the way to the Nexus7 and Asus 10″, smooth as butter. 🙂
I’ve been using Symphonical as my SCRUM list and I’m in love! It’s just super easy to use.
Collisions are in (if a little buggy) , Basic Box for the dragon and per terrain tile polygons.
The dragon is now a fully animated Spine character (16 different parts all animated) and is just a wonderful workflow.. Export from photoshop and it’s instantly in Spine, then a quick export directly into the JSON objects with an atlas and then a refresh. and the changes are live in-game..
Next up:
A little more work on the dragon animation
Then time to start adding in some terrain destructables (also Spine actors)
Then some UI work.
Busy busy week.. all freelance debugging and we development..
So not much progress on the game.
Anyway here’s another beta.. # 7 now.
http://www.swiftthought.com/temp/BarnyardBonanza007beta.apk
I’ve followed a ridiculous amount of indie and small developer projects over the last couple years and watched them just peter out and vanish into the ether. Hell, I’ve started quite a few that have gone the same way.. unfinished paintings, games, websites, etc. So why does this keep happening? What can we do about it?
Well.. It seems to be all about preventing Stalls and building Inertia to make manageable Progress.
By ‘Stalls’ I mean it literally like a plane.. Sometimes projects get caught up on a glitch, bug or feature that is unexpectedly problematic or simply a massive chore to complete. Then the motivation to work on it stops being fun and an awful lot like work. That’s not a problem if it’s your day job, you can button down and just work through it, but for the indie developer who is doing this in their spare time, once development stalls everything else starts looking more and more interesting and exciting. The longer the project remains stalled the stronger the chance is that the project is going to crash and burn.
So here’s a couple thoughts on recovering from when your project seems to be stalling and the enthusiasm is waning that seem to be working for me.
The fact that this isn’t a dayjob for many indies it means that life can sometimes turn the smallest molehil into a mountain, because Everything is a competition for your time, and the rolling rock of your project can’t go uphill very far on its own. So we need to build up momentum in our project, make it feel like it has got a life of its own or decrease the amount of work it takes to get it rolling again once it comes to a complete stop. Because, your time is precious and limited (even more so when you start having to work around a family life and maintaining a home) I tend to lean heavily toward the second approach, decrease the amount of effort needed for the next milestone. I can imagine that the first approach would work well if you have a small team where everyone is all rushing forward together, so when one person stumbles the ball keeps rolling along and lets them catch up after their personal disaster has passed. However I’m just me by myself so my tips lean toward:
Because, sooner or later, something is going to come up and you’ll have to step away from your daily progress for a week or two, like children, broken computers, holidays, family vacations, household chores etc etc. And when you come back to having time to work on your project you gotta hop back on the ball and be able to easily see where and what to do so you can get to that next ‘hey I’ve made something cool!’ moment and prevent yourself from stalling out.
Progress is king. Progress also doesn’t like being kept in the corner. Getting your project to a point where you can shout out about your progress, via tweets to #screenshotsaturday, self serving blog posts like this, friends and family on Facebook, myspace, g+ or whatever is essential. Take pride in your progress. Get used to practicing saying in public that you’re working on something, have made progress and show it off. Make it real to you and it will be that much harder to drop when the new toy sheen tarnishes and you have to spend a week debugging the text editor. It seems almost impossible at times and the odds of actually finishing something really are stacked against you but it can be done. And with great success. MinMax did it over a period of two years, CokeAndCode is doing it, RampantCoyote has done it, all of them with keeping a dayjob, family and real-life’s responsibilities.
I hope to do it too.
[deleted a bunch of excuses for my lack of progress.. lets just chalk it down to life’s little mountains]
Whoa.. after what feels like an absolutely morale crushing infernal heat wave that has more or less sapped all willpower for the last several months… it’s time to get the show back on the road.
Here’s a peak at what’s been worked on. More details as soon as I get more gameplay things put in. And after a break to Javaland it’s back to good ol TGB. The upside is that things make so much more sense now. Many more thoughts on the matter later on.
Wooosh… that’s the sound of another gale force great idea blowing around.
Yup, they’re pretty much everywhere at this time of year. Annoying, persistent, unformed, and generally really exciting!
The thing is, they’re always much more exciting and enticing than what you’re doing ‘now’. Especially if what you’re doing now is rewriting something you’ve done before, in a new engine. In the last 3 weeks I must have changed my mental description of what I’m working on half a dozen times. Each new project, idea, or whim is a terrible distraction that’s so much fun to just dive into.
Because for me the best part is the initial rush of putting ideas and framework into place and start various parts gestating. So when I haev nothing but a couple months of grunt work (asset managers, re-inputing pathfinding algorithems, importing graphics, dealing with text input etc) it is so easy to want to start over and tackle an enticing problem and find out how various systems would interact.
Hell, at this point I’ve practically convinced myself to ditch BSDDoD! and hop into making ‘Irismel’ – the fantasy village simulator instead. I’ve even started making some basic tiles and mock screenshots.
That’s gotta stop.
It’s time to get excited about BSDDoD! again. So I’m laying off the big coding for a bit and painting some assets, concept art and visually interesting things.
The upside is that I’ll have things to show before too long and I can get the show back on track.
I am, however, thinking of changing the title from Blood Soaked Deadly Dungeons of Doom! to something more palatable and url worthy.