Quick status update on Wildboarders. Every week I tend to have small incremental goals to hit. This week focused on wrapping up the supporting code to allow me to generate levels for the game. I’m slowly starting to realize my current schedule isn’t accomodating to my game dev time. It’s actually the opposite, my game dev time is working ‘around’ my schedule. Looks like I’m going to have to rearrange a few things on my weekly schedule to actually get this game done on time and make game dev my focus for the next several months. Why do we only have 7 days in a week? Sheesh.
I’m beginning to wrap up most of the ‘content’ code such as tutorials, in-game events/dialogues for the first level of the game. It’s taken a while to complete the first level just because there’s some start up development that needed to be done. I’ve designed a lot of the systems to be data-driven so ideally, level creation will be a speedier process. The only portion I’m not too satisfied with is the cut-scene/event code. Most systems like tutorials and dialogue lend themselves rather nicely to simple data-driven designs. Trying to orchestrate multiple custom in-game events for several of the levels is a daunting undertaking. I do not have the time to and resources as a single developer to go off and create a complex in-game event/cut-scene editor just for this game. The good thing is that the majority of the gameplay code is already complete, so it’s these ‘exceptions’ that are mostly left to deal with. Below is a ‘work-in-progress’ screenshot of one of the in-game events. Your character, Indy, took a bad fall and ate snow! At the moment I’m using pretty much 100% placeholder art, most of which is from the previous version of wildboarders.
So much to do… so little time…