SNOWED IN

Week of February 5th, 2017

OVERVIEW

It’s always going to be a good week when I put out a new demo. February’s Were-Release went up on Friday and I’m psyched out of my mind.

I cannot stress enough how motivational these releases are. Just the feeling of getting something out there is just so satisfying.

I’ll repeat the same warning I lay out in that post: it’s early – perhaps too early – and rough. But again, if you want to see what incremental and iterative game development is like, or if you want to provide feedback, then I’d love for you to take a look.

It’s now been a month since I quit my job. Has it been all worth it? Good god, absolutely. I have genuinely never been happier or more satisfied in my life.

I cannot say how long these good vibes will last. How will I feel when my savings start to dwindle, or if I face some unforeseen hardship? I hope I can face it with the same level of optimism and determination I have going for me now. We’ll see.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Release a new demo, one that I’m actually proud of!
• Already had a chance to implement some feedback from my demo, including some bug fixes, animation cleanup, dialog changes, and more
• Re-did my product map to more readable and analyzed
• Added a neato dynamic camera
• Completely revamped the dog to actually be usable
• Added a crate, grabbing, and pulling
• Made weather based off of a ‘forecast’ instead of hardcoded
• Added idle chatter once dialog is exhausted
• Fixed weather transitions
• Whole buncha optimizations

LOWLIGHTS

• Made a huge blunder by chasing some dumb optimization down a rabbit hole for 8 hours, only to roll it back when my new code was just as terrible and twice as unreadable
  • Lesson learned…?
• As always, could have done more 🙁
• Wish the demo had a bit more stuff to do in it. Next time, though…it’ll be different

SHOW & TELL