I’ve kind of been bouncing back and forth between making animations for this entity, trying to refine and build out the behavioral code, and going back and building out a production schedule. Animation-wise, I created a looking-around idle animation, a crouch animation, an attack animation, and a very rough jumping animation. I redid the running animation a bit as well because I decided I didn’t like the motion of the arms. I’m just now realizing that I’ve neglected to make anything for the entity turning around, which is why I should probably try to put together a list of what I need before I put this much time in, but whatever.
The behavioral code is starting to come together to the point where I can probably get something at least semi-functional up and running tomorrow, at which point I can see about getting all of these animations implemented into the entity itself. Upon reflection, some of the variations of this entity would probably be better represented as altogether new entities, and I’m starting to question the assumptions which had me fold them all into one meta entity in the first place, but I can hash all that out as I go, though it may be a bit confusing at times.
I’ve been feeling like I haven’t been putting in enough work, but have also been having a hard time focusing enough to put in more hours. I think there’s a number of reasons for this, but a big one is confusion as to what exactly to do next, so I’ve started trying to break down a complete task list for the project so that I can start scheduling out what needs to be done. I popped open the Trello outline of the project I created a couple of years ago, and found that many of the assumptions I’d made while making it were no longer useful. I’ve been deleting entries that seemed to be backwards in their approach and replacing them with new ones aimed more directly at breaking down the specific challenges I expect to deal with regarding the construction and polishing of entities and levels.
Next week should be more of the same, on all fronts. As mentioned, I still need to make a couple more prototype animations at least for this entity, and once those are done I need to start in on the other versions for different variants of the entity. The behavior is starting to come together, but even once I get it running I’m probably going to need to spend a while tweaking it before I really like it, and there, again, I’m going to need to start adding stuff on for the different variations. And, finally, for the production break-down I’m going to break it down more and more until I can’t possibly create smaller or more approachable tasks. Once that’s done, I can see about scheduling them out, one after the other, until I have some kind of a timeline for creating the game.
When in doubt, it’s useful to attack a problem from several different angles at once. I think I can get all this figured out.