PHI - DEVLOG 2

AND MY WISHLIST IS JUST GETTING LONGER

Motivation is peeking at the moment, so a lot has been going on with Phi in the last week!

First of all, I rebooted the projected. Meaning: I started a whole new scene/setup in Unity. I got rid of all the scripts and stuff like assets I made for experimentation, improved and for now finished the ones I actually want use, organized my hierarchy, settled on important conventions and structured as much as I could regarding efficiency and reusability in terms of game development. Thanks to that important step I can now work much faster and a lot of open questions have been answered, leading to a more efficient workflow.

Secondly, I went shopping for textures as well as assets while also editing a lot of my assets. Since, similar to basic conventions, I will soon also have to settle for a coherent art style for my game, this was not just a random step. In a game everything is tied together strongly and I like to avoid lose ends as much as possible. How big is what? How many polygons per? How to optimize reusability? How does which texture work? How big of how many exchangeable tiles will there be? How do different sections fit together? How does the lighting work? How high/far can you jump?… and so on. Those are not just questions for the technical and programming aspect but also build the foundation for the level design, which in turn basically points back to the general game design elements and after all should round up the whole concept to a smooth and pleasing experience.

SPICING UP THE LIFE!

 

As much as I am happy with the results so far, I know there’s still an awful lot of work to do and the screenshots by no means resemble some sort of final picture. Among other, mostly script related things, the apparent upgrades are: Basic textures for walls, floors, ceilings, doors, special dynamic sand textures, some assets, new particles for the torch. The torch can now also be thrown (which will later also be used to dispose of some enemies), there's a door connected to a switch, and for now a simple particle fog is used to create darker sections.

I am hoping to soon meet with a programmer who wants to help me in this field of work, which means that for now I will not spend too much time at the technical foundation of the game anymore but instead focus on building the simple level or rather area of the preproduction prototype. Of course I will continue to do some basic scripting for reusable objects like for example a prefab (package) composed of a door, a switch and a trigger, but mostly I want to build, make more preliminary model assets, advance the textures and get the basics of the whole level done as soon as possible, so i can spend even more time on details, decals and so on.


I have outlined the level already (see above), but the actual building process is much more time consuming and every single room can be another challenge regarding what was mentioned before. Depending on how the meeting with the programmer goes and how fast he can/wants to do what, I have to keep in mind that it may soon be necessary to create an actual 3D-placeholder-model for the main character instead of my painfully - yet funny - animated 2D stickman. Although that means the work on the level has to wait a bit, it is important to give the guy a basic but completely rigged and animated model (I like to call them “sausagemans”) so that he can work out all the real physics, transformations, parenting stuff and so on, while I can then return to work on the level.

Alright, that’s it for now. I hope on keeping the motivation high and you will enjoy the short video of me “solving” my first puzzle or rather introducing a combination of some of the most basic mechanics: Use light, find switch and open door.





Have a nice weekend and keep up the good work too!

Play more! Work more!