Wednesday, February 18, 2015

45's Devlog: Part Two (in Which I Make a to-Do List but Then Discard It and Work on Other Stuff Instead)

[This is the second entry in a series of daily devlogs I intend to make for «45», a game I'm currently working on, check the first post here.]

Well I didn't have much of free time yesterday, unforeseen plumbing work for my apartment had to be tended to, so to avoid wasting the little time left on planning, I decided to do whatever is first in my to-do list:


I've been using Google Keep for a while now, in a way that is not exactly conventional but that I feel effective in my case: Three groups with each being a subset of the other (in a moment of absent-mindedness I titled them Bones, Meat and Skin and just went with that ever since): Bones for the overarching goals (i.e. separate projects, study subjects... etcs); Meat for splitting what's in bones into more manageable/unified slices (i.e. art and programming parts made separate); Skin for dividing them into mini tasks that I should be able to finish within hours.

Or that was the plan, but then sometimes I carelessly put stuff like «Model 1st chapter environment & characters» in one single Skin task and spend the whole day failing at it for not having a clear attainable endgoal, and that's exactly what happened.


I spent an hour or so outlining the landscape of the level, I've barely modeled any open-world environments before, and it sure wasn't a-couple-of-hours task, I got bored fast and decided to code the wave animation for the river instead, now that was an easier task, pass the mesh vertices through a sine function, smooth 'em out with some math hack-fu and voilà:


Surprisingly I had some time left before I could call it a day, so I made some changes to the conversation system to conform to a decision I made earlier to drop the silent protagonist gimmick, now the main character (Norah) can talk:


Ok, that's it for now, yesterday was an alright day.

2 comments:

  1. Nice blogs.. I really didn't enjoy any of your posts as much as i did with the 45's devlogs. Keep it up.

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    1. Thank you! I'll get more technical as I go, hope you'll find any of it useful. (guessing you're of the game dev crowd)

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