I had a business meeting last week. It was the first time I showed the game to someone who wasn’t a friend or family. It was our first opportunity to get some real un-biased feedback by people in the biz. The meeting went well, and there are definite opportunities to explore. For now, we’ll keep relatively quiet on this front while things progress. We’ll make sure to bring you more information when the time is right whichever way things develop.
IndieCade formally turned us down last week. It was nice to receive a letter, and I’m obviously disappointed we didn’t get in. We haven’t received feedback yet because of an issue in their review tracking system, but we are promised something by the end of the year. Timely feedback would have been useful, but there’s not much I can do about that.
Work Done Last Week
I spent my time fixing bugs and preparing for the business meeting from last Tuesday.
Bug-wise, one of the big ones was relating to parallax. For a while, we thought the parallax was working fine. Scrolling left-right or up-down worked fine. Zoom-wise, things were actually pretty messed up. Textures on different parallax planes were zooming in at the same rate. You can actually get away with that in 2D games. In search of references, the artist and I tracked down a bunch of games that did the exact same mistake (whether by design or mistake, we’re not sure). Check out the Odin Sphere clip below. Look at how much the moon grows when the camera zooms in. Not very realistic, right? We had the same visual problem. It doesn’t make sense for the background to shift so much when we zoom. It doesn’t look right.
Fixing this zoom bug was straightforward. Fixing the editor afterward was a lot more tedious. In the editor, the texture you lay down has the same size and position regardless of which parallax plane you are working on. This makes the artist’s life simpler. Fixing this bug involved a lot of trigonometry math I no longer enjoy. Anyways, it’s done now. I doubt it will be the last of my camera concerns.
Meeting-wise, the lack of laptop led me to make some contingency plans. I prepared new builds for the demo, and spent several hours capturing video as a fallback. I’ve had issues with the build not running on certain computers. I’ve been working through the issues I’m aware, but I didn’t want to be caught unprepared in case I couldn’t demo the actual build on
I got in touch with Dell and got my situation escalated by a wonderful customer rep named Bill. I never had to spend a minute on the phone with any tech support (whether in German or English), and on Monday, a technician came by and replaced the entire motherboard. The laptop’s working fine now, and it’s got that fresh out-of-the-box smell. Happy Days!
The wedding and the entire UK trip was great. Good to see old friends and drop by the old Evolution offices.
Work Planned This Week
I’ve got lots of administrative issues to deal with this week.
I’ve also got tons more work coding-wise ahead, and I’m looking to get a handle on it. The priority is still on the gameplay and artist support, but I’m hoping to start making some improvements to the renderer soon.
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