Wasted Youth Progress Report #12

Time for another update!!

I’m in a slightly better mood for it this time. Had a bit of a powercut earlier and lost a couple hours of work, which was pretty annoying. Also I’m still a little anxious with the pace of things (as is my tendency). As I go deeper into the project it feels like I’m getting slower and slower, and these posts get harder and harder to write. Oh well, better just carry on regardless, right?

So I mentioned I was going to finally start work on the game engine last time… well, that’s not happened to any large degree.

What I have managed though is to establish more of a workflow, easing the process of designing the world.

It used to take a lot of manual work just to import a few 3D models into the project. I’ve sorted that out now so I can simply export it from the 3D editor right into Unity without any problems.

I’ve also worked out a system for object grouping which speeds up placing repeated objects. Generally I’ve worked to streamline the process so it all goes a bit quicker.

It’s difficult to report on the finer details of my ‘progress’, but in a vague way I’m finding it increasingly easy to work with Unity. However there’s no doubt I’m only scratching the surface, most of the scripting I’ve done is for utilities to aid me in creating the game, script that will never actually run in the game itself.

So you might have noticed I’ve partially spent some of my time this week with another project - I’m talking about Wasted Youth Part 1. It’s the first update in 5 years!

Not much has changed, there’s now an extra screen before the game starts informing the player of the new game I’m currently working on. There’s also a new ‘announcements’ menu accessible on the main menu - it displays any significant updates, either about the new game or if I make any further updates to the original.

It was no mean feat getting that shit to run again though. Damn.

You know those shows on the Discovery Channel which involve a bunch of middle-aged, mustachioed hunks renovating a rusty old chevy, like stripping it bare and shit? It was a bit like that. Well, OK, it felt like that.

Just to get it running I had to do loads of stuff. I ended up spending several days on it, I assumed it would take 1 or 2.

Not only was it an ordeal just to understand how it all worked again, but large portions of code had become corrupted. By this I mean I somehow portions of text that made up the code was peppered with glyphs and symbols and this resulted in some really wacky shit. The weird thing is it compiled but it then failed to run. I was amazed in fact that I managed to work out what the problem was as I was given no help whatsoever by the debugger. God knows how it happened, it will remain a mystery.

Oh and not to mention the file I worked on was so bloated and messy, the software could barely cope. I forgot just how unmanageable that project become towards the end, and that was with my older, slower rig. I probably could have finished Part 1 a couple months earlier if it wasn’t for the slowness of the software. It really was a nightmare to work on towards the end.

As a treat for anyone who cares, I decided to unlock one of the features from Part 2, an Easter Egg of sorts. If you want to know more about that visit the Facebook page and read the related post.

You can also play the original Wasted Youth, Part 1 here.

As noted in the Facebook post, certain sites with exclusive versions have not been updated, the main one being ArmorGames. The version number is now 1.3, which is displayed in the top right corner on the language selection screen and main menu.

Now that the old project is in working order and I know how to update it, I’m planning on adding at least one more easter egg which I think you and fans alike will really enjoy.

I figured as there’s a few off-cuts gathering dust, I might as well put out there, as long as they don’t spoil anything for the upcoming game.

Before I get onto the pics, I feel I should mention a few things (self conscious as usual).

The floors, walls and many objects are still plain white and untextured. I’ve been more focussed on getting the layout ‘done’, as opposed to making it look ‘done’. That said I’ve probably spent a little too much time recently with really ancillary stuff and texturing.

I’m hoping to move onto game-engine stuff next week. My priorities will be to sort out collision detection and handling room-to-room/outdoors-to-indoors transitioning. You’ll notice in it’s current state the lighting consists of a single directional light (the Sun essentially). This is fine for exterior lighting, but indoors it looks completely wrong. The interior requires a different lighting system entirely. As in the original Wasted Youth I’ll probably limit the view to a single room or possibly the entire building, so when you’re inside a building you won’t be able to see outside, just a black background. However as I'm still fairly new to 3D game design I won’t be surprised if I run into my fair share of issues trying to implement this fairly simple task.

OK. Enough of that, here’s the goods.

Some pics: