dev. diary – Page 6 – holyfingers

Development Diary #4: Progress

14 March, 20201 August, 2012 by Nick

The last couple of months have had a pretty steep learning curve but, at last, something vaguely game-like is beginning to take shape. This is what I’ve been working on:

Basic camera moves and cuts
Various types of animation control
Custom cursor with different animated rollover states
Real-time and baked shadows with toon-shading
Lightswitchs

You can see a video on YouTube here. Unsurprisingly, it’s still my lack of general scripting experience that’s slowing me up. All too often I find myself going online to “quickly” look up a reference, only to encounter basic terms I’ve never heard of and having to spend hours/days down tutorial filled rabbit-holes…

Development Diary #3: First Prototype!

14 March, 20206 March, 2012 by Nick

Following on from my last post, here’s my first attempt at a simple, working version of some basic game-mechanics. So far you can move about a bit, pick things up when you’re close enough, restart by pressing the enter key and… well that’s all actually.

Development Diary #2: First Steps

22 August, 201325 February, 2012 by Nick

Stephen Fry had a TV-show on a while back called Planet Word, in one episode he met a computational linguist who tried to teach his son Klingon as his first language, the kid made pretty impressive progress right up to the point he realized he could, effectively, only use it to communicate with his dad, after that he completely lost interest. It makes sense, I guess, if you can’t see how what you’re learning is immediately benefiting you it makes it so much more difficult to stick with…

Development Diary #1: Introduction

22 August, 201323 January, 2012 by Nick

After an unexpectedly busy year of freelancing I’ve scraped together some reserves, cleared a few months in the calendar and I’m finally making a start on a project I’ve been thinking about since I finished college: a point and click adventure game. I thought it might be a good plan to record some thoughts along the way, mainly in the hope that some of the ideas I have floating around my head can be pinned down by putting them into words, but I’m also trying to cajole myself into setting and sticking to some kind of schedule and thought keeping a diary might help with that too. There’s always the outlying chance someone else might find some of it vaguely interesting as well I guess, who knows? Let the waffling commence…