The actual meat of this week’s blog is fairly technical, with talk about the AI framework I’ve been implementing if you’re into that, but if you aren’t then you get a neat video and a progress plan at the end. Let’s jump right in.
After getting derailed 2 weeks ago from my computer problems, the last week has been going pretty smoothly as I’ve moved back into my dorm at University and did my thing over the week. Most of the time working on it was last Sunday and the 20th, where I worked about 11 hours on both of those days with only a passing few contributions over the week. I think I’d prefer to meter my schedule out better, but so far the binging works well until I have a more permanent schedule to work with.
This devblog is a week late – and for a good reason! After (and only after) a stressful week of work, on friday night, my computer shutoff while I was folding some laundry in my room. I left it until morning when I troubleshooted, took it apart, and discerned the problem as the motherboard being shot. There was no power, no lights, and the PSU was working effectively when I tested that. Neither the CMOS nor the CMOS battery inspections returned positively. I needed a new board.
In a poorly considered but (barely) affordable financial decision, I quickly researched a cheap set of replacement parts and dropped the cash to get them. It is only now I am able to access my progress, verify that nothing was lost, and put together a dev blog for what even happened that week.
Over the week I didn’t get too much that was terribly exciting done with the game. I went on vacation with my family and chilled out with my friends for the week, but that’s not to say I got exactly nothing done.
As a Christmas gift I purchased and downloaded Autodesk Maya LT 2018 and gave it a whirl, my head teeming with ideas how how this professional tool would certainly improve my productivity. I designed a quick animated “enemy” so to speak and got to work on it, but after a few hours I came to pretty much the opposite conclusion.
Working in Maya is nice, and I feel it’s strengths in certain types of modelling (higher-poly models and rendering specifically), but overall I had gotten too used to the maximalist but useful keyboard-oriented shortcuts of Blender as well as the general layout and logic the program has going for it. I’m aware I can probably get used to Maya, but I already know Blender pretty well and don’t need to spend 240 dollars a year on it.
I’d still like to save money on embedding videos to the website, so here’s a link to the test enemies in action, and by that I mean idling. Don’t expect them to be in the game at all, they’re just something I thought would be cool to test. Below is a bona fide jpeg.
Next week I’d like to clean up some animation transitions for the knife (and maybe the hit detection) and then just implement another weapon for prototyping. I’ll also update my portfolio to include an older demo for the older project and then also add my Chillenium 2017 game and write a post-mortem for that – both things of which I’ve been needing to do for a while now. Specifics are something I’ll find out as I delve further into the week.
Cheers
Steven's Thought Garden