Part of the problem with being a gameDevDad is the constant pressure from the ‘Dad’ part of this gig. Whatever I’m doing, whether its wrangling a upgrade, working on level design, or baking a nav mesh – as soon as I hear ‘daddy??’ – I’m instantly putting on a different hat. Certainly, I’m not the only stay-at-home dad who has faced the problems of being a man, at home. with k i d s. While the rest of the world trucks merrily along, without us. I’ve gotten more than one “I thought you quit!” comment from the gang at the VR dev Slack channel after I’d been away for a while. It doubles when something I’ve been meaning to work on gets delayed, like if I decide to grit my teeth and update to the latest and greatest version of software because I feel like I need a new feature (in this case, Unity’s new Timeline) – most of the people who can devote several hours a day, each and every day – they’re already on to problems I’m not even aware are coming down the pipeline. And the problems I’m dealing with are met with, “oh, um… let me dig back in the archives – I think we came up with a solution…”
Coupled with the urge to tinker with new ideas, like this itch to try and use Oculus Medium to sculpt game levels – which I feel truly breaks me out of the ‘fla’t feeling I’ve gotten when trying to use Sculptris or Blender to create levels. I feel like they are truly more organic and I can easily do things like put caves and mountains in the same level with zero difficulty. The biggest challenges are cutting them up into less than 64k polys and cutting up the UVs to get textures on them.
Some days it feels like I’m barely slogging along – and every time I try and sit down at my workstation the entire house is ganging up to sabotage my efforts. Which can lead to thoughts of: “Am I wasting my time trying to make a game?” or: “Am I taking on too much?” or even, “Can I get hi-speed internet on a remote mountaintop cave?”
This is the part I’ve been working on – it has caves, springy platforms, and all kinds of hiding places for neat little interactions. I’m hoping to use it as a demo level for the GDEX expo at the end of Sept. Keep your fingers crossed that I can get it to a workable place before then!