This last week has been pretty flat for me. I’ve done a bit of work on Nest but I’m really feeling the end-of-trimester burn. While Jacob has been busy with his other programming major project, I’ve been wading through all the scripts trying to make things work where they’re supposed to and generally tidying up. But some technical issues make absolutely no sense and I’m not sure if I just need more sleep and exercise or to burn this repo to the ground!
I’ve added a handful of sounds and particle effects but I’m struggling to get a few things working in regards to the nest, player, and feedback. More on the positive side, I’ve done a bit of work with the water and player interactions and fishing is much easier now, almost enjoyable actually. The player can kind of dive a little under the surface if they build up speed and they don’t bounce up high if they collide with water at low speeds. I’ve also recoulored interactables and birds (featured image above).
I’ve tweaked all of the values for energy and hunger for player and nest to try and make the nest less redundant. My intention is that when the player has a nest active, they should be feeding it and not themselves. So I have to make the player recover less health than the nest on consuming objects but lower the drain rate of health over time. I may have to overhaul how health and energy work completely in order to really produce this idea of symbiosis and rest/retreat that I want the player to feel towards the nest.
I’ve also recorded a few (rubbish) gameplay trailers and screenshots to put on the draft webpage for the game. I had a red-hot-go at making a poster that my lecturer wanted, I think to post at the expo at school next week. It sucks but I’m not a graphics designer. I’ve spent way too long on all this stuff and it’s really cut into production time, so I just gotta be happy with it.
What do I still need to do? I need to rewrite the player movement, flying and animation controller scripts (my scripts btw) because it’s a mess of spaghetti code that I can’t edit without breaking something and stressing-out. This is all my fault, I was in a rush to get a prototype early on and so there are so many clever systems (Jacob’s) tacked onto my half-assed base layer that break when I touch anything. It was too complex too early, I really should flesh out ideas more in documentation before I script, something Jacob and I are really bad/slack with! In the last week I’ve found the best implementations have been sketched out in my notepad during discussion, not on google docs, but on paper! I’m going to try this more in the future, even on solo projects. I mean I didn’t even have an idea about how evolution would work until I spent a few hours scribbling with colored pens and got this.
Sketch, scribble, discuss, outline the design to a stranger that knows nothing about game design, that’s what’s worked for me in the last week, mostly in regards to understanding my own vision though.
Joshua Bidwell 