It’s been a bit of a slow month for work on the EverEnding project for reasons which are largely obvious. About 10 days of the last 30 were taken up with a big holiday trip, under which circumstances I wasn’t really able to find the time and energy to work on the project – and, what’s more, left me tired and inert enough that I didn’t get much done for a while after either. That being said, progress is starting to be made, and certain foundational parts of the game are coming together.
So, to start with: The main character animations for chapter 1 are pretty much all done. I say ‘pretty much’ because I’m confident that as time passes I will notice improvements that need to be made, possibly even new animations that need to be created. However, for the time being that all-important part of the project is complete.
Once I achieved that, I turned my attention towards various outstanding programming tasks that have been on my to-do list for some time. I finally found and fixed a very annoying bug that was causing entities to self-replicate when I saved a level I was editing, which was causing massive slowdown since the entire lighting system was getting duplicated several times over. I found and fixed another bug which was causing the background layer of levels to not match the size of the foreground layer, and also created a player profile system, which should be able to handle saving and loading all the necessary information for game progression alongside all of the player’s controller/keyboard binding information. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I built a bunch of assets for the early areas of the game – mostly pretty simple ones, which makes them excellent test cases for the kinds of improvements I’ll need to make to the details system to get levels looking the way I want them to.
I’m noticing something strange now that I’ve finished the main character animations: Even though I frequently found the work tedious, having something straightforward, relatively brain-dead, and indisputably important to the core of the game to work on was actually incredibly useful. When I was feeling tired or dull or confused it was still totally feasible to get good work done just by focusing on creating animations. That is not to say that animating is easy or stupid work, but I’d already planned out all the animations such that easy and stupid work was mostly the only kind left to do on them to complete them. Now that I don’t have these animation tasks to rely upon, I feel a bit cast adrift on the gigantic task list that is this project.
Oh well, I’m sure I’ll hit a new rhythm soon enough. I think building out the levels may be similarly straightforward and rewarding, though the level editing tools may need a bit of improvement before I can dedicate myself fully to that work. Perhaps those improvements should be my first priority, then, after I get the core game systems I’m currently focused on up and running.