May

Dev Diary 36: The Road to PAX – Part 1

Yac on May 18th, 2009

This diary and the next are catch-up entries for the two weeks that I missed. I will go over aspects of development related to putting together a demo for PAX 10. pax10_photo1

The PAX demo was marked with heavy crunching, including a blistering week-end of activity right at the deadline. I hate working like that. It’s one of the activities I object to the most in the industry, and one of the main reasons I left traditional game development. And here I am, making the exact same mistakes.

Of course, I try to rationalize things to myself: It was my first big demo. I wanted it to look as best as possible, to get every last feature in. I didn’t want to kick myself later on for not getting certain features in, which might have made the difference between being a finalist, and being rejected.

But I know myself. I crunch because I am lazy at times. I’ve discussed this personal trait before. I tend to leave things late and excuse it by saying I work better under pressure. In the end though, it’s simply lack of discipline and planning.

I’m not going to beat myself up over it though. I’m pointing it out here in an effort to avoid repeating the same mistakes and to learn from it. I am happy with the result, just not how I got there.

The one decent rationalization I can make is that I didn’t force anyone else to crunch along with me. Still, that’s not entirely true. My crunching affects others, not least of which are my friends and the missus, although they probably enjoyed having a break from me. A silver lining perhaps?

I will continue to address this issue. These are not the working conditions that I want to set forth for my company or myself (especially since I love my free time).

Work Done Three Weeks Ago

I finished implementing my help system, save for a few bugs and visual display issues. It’s a simple system that displays hints as you move through different triggers area, and will need further improvements, but it fit my needs for the demo.

The camera was also improved and it now tracks the player smoothly (no more jerkiness), and zooms out nicely as the player grows in size. Again, it fits the needs of the demo, but I have plans to replace it with a different system (which I’ll discuss in another diary).

I continued to improve some of the new systems I have put in place, adding better level editor support as I go along. The player control system continues to improve.

I spent a while debugging my collision detection system. I’m using box2d to track when the player enters specific trigger areas. For whatever reason, I am constantly losing contact points. I spent a good while trying to address this and I have a solution that can at best be described as a compromise, and at worse a “complete hack”.

I finally added keyboard support for the controls, as requiring an xbox gamepad was limiting my selection of testers. My worry was that it would be awkward to control on the keyboard, and of course, it very much is. The lack of analog inputs makes the character (and the shooting) difficult to accurately control. I’ll have to give it another think.