Saturday January 4th 2020
One week has passed since I began the first development sprint of production. I am very excited to talk about the progress so far. I am off on Saturday's and I guess since I recap on Friday's that is essentially the beginning of my development week. I will be going part time at work at the end of February so my schedule will likely change significantly. Saturday was a full day of programming the ui(user interface) and fiddling with the main menu. I played with the idea of having an animated menu but remembered that would mostly be a distraction. I ended up just adding some simple flashing, a small particle effect on the flare, and text highlight on the menu buttons. In the future I intend on having an animated background of within the headquarters building. I also started to work on my back end coding for the world generation. This is a major part of the game so it will likely take some time to complete the entire system in a way that works for a prototype.
Sunday January 5th 2020
With work and life, Sunday's are a bit tighter on production. I was able to review some world generation code I had written for a small "game jam" game I had been working on. I also did some design work on some food and water designation buildings.
Monday January 6th 2020
After work, I jumped back into the procedural generation of the world. I initially had the idea that each game tile would be roughly no larger than one squad of three soldiers but after doing some stress testing on the initial world generation I discovered that the tiles would need to be much larger.
Tuesday January 7th 2020
Day job continues... Lots of dark work going on the last few days. Procedural generation of a world is a slow going and rather boring process to show. Most of the work I had done was create the base classes for the tile generation and tools that will allow me to continue onto the other major pieces of the construction. I also have been stress testing consistently to make sure early on design decisions won't kill my frame rate. One thing I discovered right away was that since I am not directly generating a mesh and am instead piecing together a quilt of game tiles that I had to glue the pieces back together after creating them. This dropped my draw calls down significantly.
Wednesday January 8th 2020
My regular mid day off work... I get lots more done. I spent a majority of the day working with the ground tile generation classes again. The main part I worked on was getting the world to spawn hill points and then soft edges around those hills. As you can see in the video below, I am not quite there yet. You also might notice it kind of looks like the letters "HI" written all over the ground. Life's little accidents... :) Anyway... It looks awful, but that is the way everything begins.
Thursday January 9th 2020
After getting off work, other strange brother and I had a brief recap on game progress and discussed some design opportunities. We did not have long though as we had plans to go see the new Star Wars film with our Dad... Strange Dad.
Week Review:
The first real week of production is complete and I feel like we are still so far from my first prototype goal completion on February 28th. I am still super excited every moment I get to work and look forward to showing better progress. The weekly poll results are in and "Devil Fly" is the winner. We had a staggering 1 person vote!!! I am legitimately appreciative of that one vote and hope that more join in the future. I may start placing the polls directly on twitter as many likely do not want to take the time of visiting the site. I will make that decision this week, but for now I will post the next poll on the site as well.
Weekly Win:
Knocked out a bunch of dark room work including the games state machine which I completed in a mere three hours.
Weekly Opportunity:
I need to do a better job of sticking to my daily objectives. I had made the effort to plan days of the week out by necessary skill to keep them honed and I did mostly coding. 2d and 3d art really took a back seat this week.