A few different topics to cover this week.
On Friday, I am heading off to the US for two weeks (visiting family and friends, eating delicious burgers and Mexican food, resting). I won’t be working as actively on the game, but I will still get some work done when I can. And I’ll update when appropriate. There might be a slight lull in development diaries.
This past Wednesday I met with Remote Control Productions (a games consulting company) in Munich. I wanted to examine the production services offered. This company offers standard design, production and business consulting for video games, but is also involved quite a bit in developing the game developer community in Munich. I don’t know if anything will come of it yet, but I will meet with them again when I return. At the very least, it’s good to meet other like-minded local developers.
On Saturday, I attended GameCamp Munich, a small self-organized game developer conference hosted at the Microsoft offices North of the city. I was joined by two friends Rory, and Tony, who, although they had no interest in game development, kept me company nonetheless and helped translate some of the terser German discussions we encountered.
I’m working hard to get a new company and game website ready so I can introduce the art work for the game (and the new artist of course). My hope is to roll out an early version this week, and keep improving on it afterwards. Fustian Future as a website and blog has run its course. I’ll provide more information as we move along.
Work Done Last Week
I made several significant usability improvements in the editor. The biggest one was the undo functionality. This has been lingering on my mind for a while. I spent all week mentally working out the best way to implement it. By the time I sat down to implement it, I had it mostly solved, and got it working quite quickly. Most of the operations are still not undoable, but all the important ones (moving, rotating and scaling objects). I’ll slowly add support for the other operations as I move forward.
I completed the new game mechanic I mentioned last week. It’s not tuned correctly yet, but it presents interesting new possibilities. Lots of balancing ahead.
I’m still continuing work on the design. This week, it culminated with me being up last night at 3 am with too many ideas coursing through my head. I had to get out of bed and write out a stream of consciousness so I could get back to sleep. We are getting very close. I am one or two key changes away. Although I feel like I’ve been saying that for a while.
Obviously, I also spent some time dealing with a few administrative issues.
Finally, on the art side, some of the new test level art work is already looking really good. On Friday night, I showed the test level to a few friends, and they were all impressed at how much of a visual difference the new art work makes.
Work Planned This Week
I will continue to focus on gameplay and level design, trying out some different ideas throughout the week.
I will continue to improve the editor, both on some long planned features, and by reacting to requests from the artist.
I will also work on the new company and game website. If things progress nicely, there should be some more posts this week.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply