It’s been an odd week. It kind of feels like almost no time has passed at all since the last DevBlog update. Being inside my head sometimes is like some kind of reverse Narnia where I spend what feels like a few hours here and there doing odds and ends and then I leave to see what’s going on and it’s suddenly a year later.
It’s kind of like a time machine where the brake fluid’s been drained.
Anyhoo.
Last update, I was feeling optimistic about the general trend of my work on the collision detection system. And, actually, I am today as well. In between, though, there were a lot of rough days. As you may recall, there were three discrete steps remaining to implementing the collision detection system: First, adding some nuance to the different reactions so that each edge reacted in a way that would make sense later on. Second, implementing the new stuff back in where the old collision system went and making sure everything worked. Third, adding in slope tracking functionality so that, when running across terrain, Eve wouldn’t pop up off of it when the angle changed.
Well, the good news is that I’m well into that third step now, and it’s going pretty well. The bad news is that before I got there I spent a long time on that second step being really depressed that it wasn’t working correctly, right up until I got it fixed and running the way I wanted it to. Between that depression and some weird weather and other disturbances, my sleep schedule kind of imploded and I basically lost a couple of days of work.
Oh well. We’ll call it a weekend or a vacation.
I also had a bit of story for the game kicking around in my head, so I took that opportunity to get away from depressing collision problems as well and got that bit written up. So that’s good too.
So: With the collision detection fiasco finally nearing some kind of resolution, what’s next?
Well, once I have collision working for most standard situations, I’m probably going to continue testing it and tweaking it to make it feel as natural and controllable as I can possibly manage. Some of these may get a little bit weird and esoteric, and I doubt that I’ll be able to figure out everything I want to do right away, so this is going to be something of an ongoing project, probably in parallel to the level design. I’ll be starting a list of little movement tweaks like these and maintaining it as I go.
Next, and I’m kind of a week or two behind on this but whatever, I start approaching a solution to making attacks work. I’m probably going to stick with the philosophy I espoused last week of starting on the outside and working in and begin by creating and implementing attack animations and then, once those are complete, implementing code underneath them that behaves in a manner consistent with how the animations look like they should behave. I like doing animation work since it’s usually easy to focus on, I rarely get stuck on it (though sometimes I have to redo work), and it gives me something cool to show off here on the DevBlog, so I’m rather looking forward to hitting this phase of the project in a few days.
Well, that’s this week. Hopefully I will have a fully armed and operational collision system by next week, along with a couple of nifty attack animations! Thanks!
First were the Night Lands. None know how vast they are: Some say they have an end, some say they go on forever, some say that if you could walk there for long enough you would eventually find yourself back where you started. It is not known. It shall never be known.
Into the Night Lands were born the nomads. Each carried a lamp with them, and though each moment they grew further apart they could still see each other by the lamps they bore. When one light winked out, they knew they were one fewer, and their pilgrimage grew that one part lonelier.
Each nomad set out to find a land of their own, a Heart Land. The Night Lands are a vast empty desert, so the nomads searched for an unimaginable length of time. Some of them never found their way and wander still: Many more found lands of their own and settled there, living out their days in peace. A few, though, found their lands and found that they were unsatisfied. Rather than simply enjoying the Heart Lands as they were, they could not help but imagine a world of possibilities for what their lands could become.
It was they that found, or perhaps created, or perhaps fell into, the Dream Lands, the vast world of things that never were. In these Dream Lands they planted the seeds of what they imagined. They created servants, there, to help them plant the crops, to help them till the fields, and to help the worlds they saw in their mind’s eye come to fruition.
These nomads were foolish enough to believe they could craft happiness out of a flawed world. And, perhaps for a time, they could. But these worlds never lasted: For the flaw they perceived was in their own hearts, and that flaw flowed out from them and corrupted their vision of a beautiful world. One by one, the Heart Lands showed cracks, cracks the nomads were powerless to fix.
And, one by one, the Heart Lands broke.
