Number 11 already, Christ. Have I been working on this for 22+ weeks already? That doesn’t fill me with much hope I have to admit.
Sorry guys, if you haven’t guessed already this is going to be a bit of a moaner.
While I haven’t slowed down in terms of work and effort towards this project, it’s just not been looking very dynamic recently. Considering the vast amount of stuff I’ve yet to work on, I’m starting to have that apprehensive feeling again, what I’ve previously referred to as my ‘wobbles’.
Being realistic, if I carry on at this pace it’ll take considerably longer than a year.
That’s not being glib, it’s just what it is.
The problem with writing these updates every 2 weeks is it often lands when I’m feeling pretty unenthused by the whole thing - and then you get one of these whiny blog posts.
It’s not ideal is it?
To get back to the game itself, it’s not looking quite right at the moment. Let me explain:
For the last 2 weeks I’ve carried on creating yet more objects.
I’ve got something like 250+ significant objects now, with about half of them textured (unfortunately there’s also a problem with regards to texturing - more on that later). I’ve got all the common school paraphernalia and then a whole lot more.
It was only yesterday though that I finally imported all these models into Unity so that I could use them to fill the necessary space.
By the way, it might sound a bit artless and crap, but from my point of view the prime objective right now is simply to fill space. It makes me wonder if I’m maybe not of the right mindset to design an interesting and immersive game. I must admit with regards to design I’m kinda just winging it and hoping for the best. There's nothing high-minded or clever about this approach, but it gets the job done.
So I filled some space with these newly imported models (which took waaay longer than expected), and unfortunately the end result still felt rather empty.
I can’t explain it, it looks good from within the view of the editor, I can make a room which - dare I say it - looks like an actual room, but when I run the game it looks so much more sparse. I think this is simply because the camera that follows the player has such a limited view. There are no distant objects to catch your eye due to the tilted downward perspective. It’s fantastic for performance, however it naturally focuses your attention on the minutiae of a scene.
This probably looks like I’m being overly critical, maybe I am, but I couldn’t help but think ‘oh dear’ when I stood back and had a look at it all.
Here’s some pictures of the English classroom from a free perspective in which it looks quite good (sort of*).
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* You’ll notice it’s looking a bit simple again. It all went wrong when I imported these hundreds of objects into the Unity project all at once. Unity for whatever insane reason is really dumb when importing 3D models with textures, basically it means I have to maunally reallocate all the texture files for each model through Unity's shitty interface. To do this manually for a few hundred objects would take me several hours (not to mention it would be mind numbingly tedious) and I was already in a rush so I decided to leave that for another day. Hopefully I’ll find some way of automating it. Anyway, there's my excuse.
It’ll at least take me a couple weeks to finish decorating the first floor of all the buildings, but I might focus my attention instead on finally establishing the game engine in the meantime.
I half-promised a video last time but it’s not in a very presentable state right now. Sorry about that.
Instead, here’s some random bits and pieces which I’ve cobbled together from the last 2 weeks:
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One of many bookcases |
A poster for the Foreign Languages classroom |
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Perfect space filling material for most games, not sure how I'll use them though. |
An old school computer |
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Don't drink too many fizzy drinks, you might be sick. |
A half finished snack vending machine |
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Some leafy plants and a sunflower |
Just some boring kitchen crap |
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Loads of books. Look closely, you might notice a few familiar titles |
I came up with a fake brandname for all of the electronic appliances. It turned out the 1998 film 'Small Soldiers' also came up with the same name, so I lovingly remade their logo as my own in Photoshop. |
Having collected my thoughts while writing this and preparing the pictures, I’m wondering if I’ve maybe been too hard on myself during the moaning section of the post. Possibly.
It’s still pretty much impossible to estimate a completion date when I’ve barely scratched the surface on the game side of things, but from where I’m standing it looks distant as hell.
It must seem ridiculous that over 4 months in, the project so far barely resembles a game.
That’s what I get for choosing to make it in 3D.
I’m still happy to have chosen this path, if only so it can teach me something new… It’s bloody hard work though.