There’s not so much to say in this week’s devblog that I haven’t already mentioned, but you can see the fruits of my labor with the Hare AI and check out an in-depth idea of my dev plan leading up to the end of April.
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
This post signifies the official birth of Armchair Factory’s website. We’re a team of college lads who are into making video games, and while the site is run by me and host to my portfolio, you can find all sorts of information about our team and what we’re working on within this domain.
If you are a friend, casual follower, or just passing through, you can check out the blog to get updates on the studio, whatever project we’re working on, and maybe the occasional thought piece or short story. I don’t currently know how often I’m gonna update project progress, but I’ll probably start doing bi-weekly or monthly updates once we get past pre-production on a project, maybe more often if there’s stuff to talk about.
If you’re curious about what I’ve worked on in the past, there’s a Portfolio, which contains various significant things I’ve worked on in the past – you can read about my thoughts on them and browse some pictures if you so choose. The About page has, for now, just some light information about me and my affiliates, and if you want to contact me, check out the Contact page.
I hope whatever I post in the future is fun or interesting to read and that I’m not too long between posting anything to make it worth coming to every now and then – I’d also like to maintain that the content you get linked on your visit here to is worth your time. As for what to expect next, right now we’re in pre-production on a new Unity project, so hopefully I’ll have stuff to show soon.
Steven's Thought Garden