We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming…

Hey folks, it’s Wednesday. This is going to be fairly sparse, but I want to get this out fast to get back to work, so I’ll try to recount what I’ve done recently and show a few pieces of art I’ve enjoyed recently to make it visually interesting.

I’ve been listening to a NieR Tribute Album recently, which isn’t a genre I typically listen to, but it takes a bizarre and super fresh take to what is probably one of the best soundtracks of last decade. Anyway, onto the blog.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

After flying into San Francisco from Kansas, taking a bus to transfer to SFO after an unexpected detour to San Jose, and taking the subway to my hotel, I hit the sack and woke up next morning to a wonderful 3-day experience at GDC. This was my second year at the conference, and while I’m young – still cultivating work before I can show a lot of it off – I ended up having a great time just going to talks and meeting with people.

I spent most of my time at the event on the Expo floor, which I spent mostly talking to indie devs at the Indie Dev Megabooth. The coolest devs there were probably the Subset Games developers and the Baba Is You dev, Hempuli Oy, who was a cool, talkative dude. Thursday and Friday had more talks, however, including the wonderful presentation on Hellblade on both how the studio made the game on their budget and how they managed to study and portray Psychosis so well. Friday had several good career seminars as well – my favorite of which was “Marketing on Zero Budget”, which managed to dodge a lot of the rote techniques and bring up some excellent advice that made it stand out.

I’ll be going again next year with the Gamedev club again at my University, and my goal is to make some contacts beforehand to try to meet up with more seriously.

Next Week

“Did I Get Anything Done This Week?” I ask myself this pretty much every week, and even if I have a good excuse – like going to San Francisco – I still feel like I need to show significant stuff if I’m gonna make the blog weekly. I knew this one would be sparse, but I still kind of feel bad about it.

Soooo next week I’ll hopefully have the AI in a playable combat state. As much as I enjoy the process, stretching AI work over weeks makes it more difficult than it needs to be, and the thought of jumping back in just isn’t all that appealing. But after that (and that’s a big that, it might take two more weeks before I’m well and satisfied) I’ll have the luxurious pleasure of level design, probably my most comfortable and experienced niche of game development. Between the quickly approaching demo day and the lack of environmental assets I have, this may not be simple, but I’ll allow some breather room up until the end of the year (past the deadline) to make a reasonable demo, considering its importance as a development milestone.

That has yet to be done, however. Next week: AI. Perhaps more after that. I’ll see you in seven days.

Cheers.