I hate writing tools. They’re like the vegetables you had to finish as a kid before you could get any ice cream for dessert. I need the tools. I have to write them, but I do not enjoy doing so. They’re standing in the way of the fun stuff.
The editors require more work and the serialization must be completed so that my framework can effectively be used by artists. And I need that so that I can start including art work into the prototype, and to quickly iterate on levels. It is necessary work, and it will speed up production down the line, but it’s boring work.
What makes it worse is that once that’s done, I can finally continue work on the implementing some of the design ideas. You would think that the anticipation would push me harder to get these tools out of the way, but sadly, my mind doesn’t work that way. All I see is a mountain of Brussels sprouts, broccoli and beets.
I’ll mention a little bit about my next milestone since I’ve been hinting at it already. My goal is to get the tools in a state to be useable for artists, and to prototype some of the core gameplay ideas from the last milestone. There’s not much time left before Christmas (when I’ll be heading home to the US for a few weeks). The pressure is on and I want to get as much done as possible before then. I want the game to start taking shape. I expect there will be long hours and week-ends. And hopefully some ice cream.
Work Done Last Week
I put together a rough design doc last week. It took longer than expected, but I also had a lot more notes to put down than I estimated. Over the next few weeks I’ll iterate on it regularly, and start trimming the ideas and focusing on the core game.
I did more work on component system, and serialization. It’s taken a lot longer than I expected, and productivity wise, the week was disappointing. I spend too much time trying to figure out how all the systems are going to fit in, and it is struggle for me to just keep things simple. This is something I need to address because I’m really starting to eat into my dev time.
Snowboarding was awesome, and the mental break was very welcome.
Work Planned This Week
I want to finish the basic work on the object editor this week and move onto working on the actual game. I want to start prototyping some of the core game ideas and continue refining some of the experimental work I did last month.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply