OK, I think I’m over the hump on tools. All the boring, painful work is finally them. I don’t hate them so much anymore, now that the worse bit is behind me. It’s not like we’re friends or anything, but I won’t walk right back out the door if I see them sitting in my local pub.
Bad jokes aside, I’ve drawn several conclusions based on what I’ve done so far. The tools process is going to be an on-going on for many months. As things started coming together the last few weeks, I can see many new areas of opportunities and new features I can introduce which would either make the game more fun, the sandbox more interesting, or the life of my artists simpler. All of those are wins and worth investing in.
Now that the foundation is laid down, each new feature I add opens up a door for several cool new ideas to be implemented. That can be a bit off-putting as the backlog of work keeps piling up, but all these things have to get done at some point before the game can be released. More importantly, now that I have a decent system in place, productivity is increasing and I can add new features much quicker. It’s another one of those long-term investments which is starting to pay off. Happy days.
State of the Project
The holiday season is upon us, and I will be away visiting family and friends in various places over the next three weeks. I’ll be in Nuremberg for Christmas with the missus, Brussels for New Years with good friends, and then in DC visiting family. I won’t be doing dev diaries as such, but I plan to keep posting on a regular basis until I am back. There are a few topics I want to explore during this break.
Also, when I’m back, I’ll post the results of Milestone 2, plans for the next milestone, and a peek into the plans for the next few months. With the design taking shape and the tools coming into place, things will start becoming a lot more exciting. I want to share as much of the process as possible.
Work Done Last Week
I did a lot more work on both the level editor and object editor, and they’re really coming along. In fact, they’re both in a usable state, and all the work hence forth will be polish and new features. I spent a lot of time updating and robustifying the underlying architecture, and I’m happy with what I’ve got now. The GUI flow is a lot more straightforward and easy to extend. The graphics library is more flexible. It’s now cache and streaming friendly, which will come in handy down the line. The component system is just lovely. It was worth taking the time to wrap my head around the concept (thank you MickWest!).
Overall last week was good performance-wise, and I’m happy with the progress I’ve made.
Work Planned This Week
There’s a little bit of work to be done today, Monday, and then it’s the holidays. I don’t expect to get much done coding-wise now or for the next few weeks, but I am going to spend some of my spare time going over the design (I’ve got feedback notes to incorporate), and the business side of things.
If I do any coding it will be on a little (non-gaming) side project. I’m trying to pick up Python, and I’ve got a cool little idea to play around with. More on that later.
Aside from that, I’ll be celebrating little baby Jesus’ birth, and all the eating, drinking and partying that event entails. Happy New Year everyone!
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