The trip ended up taking a lot out of me. I’ve been feeling rather tired. Progress on the project is still happening, but it’s slowing down a bit while I figure out when to fit each task into my say and calibrate my systems to get those tasks accomplished. I also currently need to divert a bit of my focus into more immediate problems, such as money, rather than long term goals like Eve.
Thus: No big leaps of progress this week, but instead a number of small nibbles around the big problems I’m getting to.
Firstly: Animations. I think it’s more or less settled in my mind at this point that I’m going to need to have some degree of body-part breakdown to get this character animated, but I haven’t decided yet how far to take that philosophy. Is an arm one object, or is it three (base, forearm, hand)? When do I decide to draw out a pose? How do I keep them from seeming canned? I still haven’t settled on any decisive answers yet. If I could think of any games with similar animation I would ask the artist how it was achieved, but I can’t really think of any other game with a style like this.
I guess now I know why.
Second: Collision. It’s still not quite perfect, but it’s getting very close to what I want. Behaviors against surfaces are in general far more predictable and solid-feeling than they were before. However, there’s currently a bug which I’m reasonably confident I understand the source of but which I haven’t decided on a fix for yet, wherein collisions are tested against the wrong surface and result in an ugly bouncing reaction.The choice is between somehow altering the algorithm so it detects these cases (hard, but robust) or changing the shape of the character so that they rarely/never happen (probably less hard, less robust). I’ve kind of tabled it for the moment due to being tired of working on collision detection, but hopefully I’ll glean an insight on how to approach it at some point here.
Third: Entities. I started putting together the bones of a system for managing entities and allowing them to affect each other – a rather important feature for a game. The system of interaction itself looks like it will be super simple, but the trick will be in using that system to have entities interact in a manner that doesn’t break the game.
Those are where my effort has been going this week. Over the next week, I’m going to continue nibbling at those tasks, but also hopefully get in and start animating the additional animations I’ve identified as necessary (just more reason to figure out an efficient method for creating finished animations). These include: A standing/pressing on slope animation, an air attack, and an animation for harvesting lost spirits – long story.
So that’s this week. Not too bad, but it certainly shows that there were a couple of days where I couldn’t really get anything done mixed in. So it goes. Here’s hoping for bonus productivity this coming week!