It’s times like this that the difference between working for yourself and working for someone else really hit home. Yesterday Vancouver beat their all time temperature record, with the previous record set in 1960 I guess. In my office at home it was 98 degrees. The previous day had been so hot I decide to go with my wife to the university she works at in order to hide in their library and work there in the air conditioning. I’ve had very little sleep all week, tossing and turning in the heat.
Air conditioning, statutory holidays, sick days, these things are nice to have. Do they come close to the joy of working for yourself and building your own business? Hell no!
The artist and I spent all of Friday fighting some seriously annoying problems with the FBX files exported by Maya when brought into Unity iPhone. It seems that even after trying every combination of FBX exporter version, Maya version, exporting selected, exporting all, etc… we can’t seem to get our newly modeled main character into the game and animating properly. The best we’ve been able to achieve is an untextured version of the character with screwed up normals. The most common result is some funky disaster where all of the bones are imported with 0.1 scale on them, making the guy’s various body parts all shrimpy and floating around in space disconnected. You can’t just manually put the scale back to 1, because though this makes the character visible and in the right spot, as soon as he’s animated all his parts go flying everywhere. It was a very frustrating day and we had hoped to accomplish a lot more than we did.
The good things that came out of Friday though were a solid sense on the design of the level we’re working on and what the look is. So once we figure out these technical issues we’re well into having something nice to work with.
I’m back from my sister’s wedding and working hard at getting a fully flushed out level for the game. I’m hoping that early next week I’ll have something decent I can show up here, but a lot depends on the artist I’m working with and the time he’ll have available to getting the art where it needs to be.
I thought I’d work more while visiting my family, but I should have known better. It was far to easy to go out to eat, visit, sleep in, or any other thing besides work. I guess that’s alright, but I have a lot to do now so I’ll have to be working some very late nights for awhile. Ah well, at least the break was nice.
While I’ve been traveling I’ve become acutely aware of just how pervasive iPhones have become. I used to see Blackberry’s everywhere, but now I’m seeing iPhone after iPhone, and constantly people are tapping away at apps. This, and the current unavailability of the iPhone 3Gs at Rogers Canada due to crazy demand gives me hope for the future and comfort in my market continuing to grow. I.e. this definitely isn’t just a fad.
Vacation is usually very awesome, but when you work for yourself it’s difficult to shrug the feeling that you should be working. It feels like every day I don’t work is one less day of survivability for my small startup. If it weren’t for my sister’s wedding which I have flown out of town to attend I definitely wouldn’t be on vacation.
On the other hand I’ve been working my ass off lately, and the burnout creep had begun. Maybe this will be just what I need to turn that around, and the net increase in productivity will make up for the lost time.
Yeah let’s go with that! I’ll be back next week.
Now that the artist and I have figured out the look for the game and he’s working away at that it’s time to go from placeholder positions for all the platforms to real level design. I also need to implement part of the gameplay that connects the speed and pace of the level to the background music. When the music is fast, the level’s platforms will drop quickly, and vice versa. So I need to implement some sort of timing system where I can place markers for points in the song for each level that require speed changes and the appropriate speed change. Should be pretty easy.
I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out interesting layouts. I don’t want the level to be just made up of nothing but platforms going back and forth across the level of course. That’d be a little boring. The platforms will be rotating and moving around, so that’s fun in itself, but I’ve got to make sure I’ve got the movement mechanics figured out so we can do more than just the back and forth.
This is where the anchoring will really come into play I think. I can put a lot of objects in the world to swing off of, they don’t need to be platforms. I could make gymnastics-like poles that you would anchor too then completely swing around.
I can make use of bouncing off objects too. I can bounce off the level walls, or off platforms that have rotated to act as nice reflection walls. So I’ve got lots of options.
I can’t wait till we start getting the art, and the gameplay really nailed down so I can start posting the look and show it off. I think it’s going to be a fun game when it’s done.
Initially in my prototype just filler level with platforms randomly all over the place I just have a hard coded spawn point the character goes back to. Well it’s time to figure out the right way to respawn in this game and I’m having a hard time figuring out how I want to do it. Right now the design is allowing for respawning during the level. In which case I can’t go the traditional route since I have no idea where the player will die in the midst of the level. I’ve got a few options I guess:
- Go the old school route, have obviously marked way points. When you activate them or pass them that’s where you’ll spawn should you die. This could be fun I guess if you have to go over and land on them to turn them on and that’s a challenge in itself.
- Randomly fire the guy up from the bottom with a random trajectory. Bring him back on the Z axis so that he’s flying up past the platforms in the scene at first, but slowly interpolate his Z back to 0, eventually he’ll bonk his head on something and the user is left to fend for himself.
Right now I’m preferring the trajectory idea. But I’m not sure if that will be practical. I could see a lot of players flinging their iPhones at the wall when they get fired up in some random trajectory and then bounce off platforms only to die again with no chance to land or grab onto something.
I’m looking forward to next week. It’s my sister’s wedding so I’m going to my hometown for vacation to hang with the family. Unfortunately my wife’s at a conference for most of the week and can only join us on the day of the wedding. Would be nice if she were there too the whole time.
The artist and I are working on figuring out the style still. I’m not going to show early stuff for that until we’ve got our first level done. Our intention is to polish one level, and then approach a band showing them our work. I’ll propose to the band that we would like to use their music in exchange for us promoting their music and providing ingame links to buy their songs on iTunes. We’ll see if that works. If it doesn’t work it will be easy to switch gears and start looking for our own custom audio.
I spent time trying to find placeholder sounds for the few sounds I’ve added to the game and the selection on the internet of free sounds is so bad it’s ridiculous heh. I’ll have to start looking for an audio designer soon I can pay for some sounds. I’ll wait until our style is completely locked down before I do that though.
Tech wise I’ve figured out the GUI system in Unity, I’ve got placeholder sounds all hooked up and I’ve done a bunch of tuning to get the game lots more fun to play. Now I’ve got to start investigating particle effects and how I do those and also figure out some more scripted platform behaviours.
