Eh well the December project didn’t really go anywhere. I can at least put some screenshots of how far I got before I decided I’d kind of messed up:
I spent a week or two planning this building layout, figuring out Pro Builder (a tool for constructing 3d objects within Unity), and picking up the basics of other tools, such as Unity’s terrain system. In the end, I was… dissatisfied. I felt like I had just the very edges of what could be an interesting environment, but Pro Builder was becoming increasingly unfriendly the more I worked on it, and small issues with the geometry got harder and harder to fix – leaving me unable to make important changes, such as adding more windows.
I then decided that I needed to be able to work on this in a more full-featured 3d environment. I don’t know whether this was a good or a bad decision, but it was definitely the beginning of the end for this project. Originally, I’d hoped to just export the model from Pro Builder into Blender, a free and very full-featured 3d editing software. Unfortunately, all of the work I’d done in texturing and detailing the environment in Pro Builder came to work against me, with every separately textured subsurface of the object exporting as a separate element. I’d hoped to just drop my old work into Blender and immediately start work again, but this proved to be unfeasible. Over the next few days I studied the basics of Blender, and I began to reconstruct the building – but it is, after all, very difficult to be enthusiastic about doing the same work twice, and my capacity for enthusiasm is inconsistent at the best of times.
At this point we were pretty close to Christmas anyway, and my attention went away from getting game work done and towards all of the preparations that came with that. After Christmas I was mostly focused on cleaning and thinking about what the next year is going to look like. I’m still thinking a lot about those things, but it’s time to start a new project…
Well, close to it anyway! I’m actually not quite done with holiday stuff, and will be traveling for the next several days. Once that’s past I’ll have all month free, and hopefully by the time I get back home I’ll have a solid idea of what I want to work on. I do have a general plan of approach, though, for what I want the next several projects to be, based on the skills I want to pick up and practice:
January: Wizard Jam. The Idle Thumbs community runs a semiannual game jam where people spend a couple of weeks making a game, usually based on the title of one of the podcasts. This community has been a great source of support for me over the last couple of years, and though I’ve participated in the Jam a couple of times I’d like to put some work into something I can really be proud of this time. I’d also like to collaborate with at least one other person.
February: 2d Platformer. I would like to spend a month putting together a simple but complete 2d platformer. The purpose of this is twofold: First, to create a game simple enough that I can focus on creating content for it, and second to gain an understanding of how 2d works in Unity. The latter is important because it’s going to determine if, when I return to work on EverEnding, I continue that project in Flash or reimplement it in Unity. Probably the former, but I want to be open to the latter.
March: Album. I miss writing music, and though these other projects will probably provide opportunity to do so I’d really like to make it the focus of my efforts for a while. There’s a slight chance I might swap this one to February, since I’d prefer to dedicate fewer days to it and more to the 2d game, all else being equal.
April: EverEnding, Chapter 1, Part 1. I think if I really focus for a month, I can create the introductory areas of EverEnding to a degree that is, if not finished quality, at least close enough that I can finish most of the rest of the game before I take another quality pass. If I hit this milestone, I’ll start regularly setting up work months like this. I really don’t want to abandon this project! But I don’t want to be okay with it taking forever either.
All in all, it’s hard to be upset with how this month went. I’m disappointed that the project didn’t turn into anything, but I’m hoping I can keep up the momentum I started in learning these 3d tools, which have generally been a weakness of mine for a long time. I learned a bit more about the danger of trying to do things the ‘right way’ as well – this has been a vulnerability of mine for a long time, of feeling bound to execute whatever I feel to be the ‘proper’ way of doing something. The proper approach, though, is the one that creates a game, and so far that seems to elude me.
Hopefully, in a month, this space will describe my new Wizard Jam game – or games? Until then, hopefully I can also manage to keep up on Problem Machine blog posts a little bit better than I’ve been managing the last couple of weeks.