Ever since the awesome week of dev back in September; I have been more slammed than I can remember. Between sis-in-law’s 40 birthday rope line adventures, wife grandma’s 100th birthday, Fall Foliage tours, Boo at the Zoo for the kids, going to see Steely Dan with bro-in-law, Halloween and the ever increasing list of crap that needs done around the house, I’m amazed I’ve even gotten any work done at all.

What dev work that has been done, has been centered around a offer from Phatboysh –  a fellow VRTK dev that I met up with at GDEX. I was busy hawking my game when he dropped by and asked to play (and later provided one of the best quotes of the weekend:  ‘I got kicked out of @fletcherstudios booth today because the mass swarm of kids wanted to play his game’ )

As he was playing -he had asked if the sock quest was a static distribution or randomly placed. I told him that while I’d love to have sock randomly distributed around the level, it was beyond my ability to create. He surprised me by offering to create a script that could do it – and did so rather quickly. The biggest hurdle then became backing out my old sock quest and integrating this new mechanic. Trying to hunt through multiple FSM’s and recreate everything from UI updates to win conditions left me overwhelmed – and resolved that I need to document my crap better.

Another hurdle I gave myself was to re-do the Ice Cream level – after my wife pointed out that where I was putting a spider web had no physical place to attach itself to. That, and I’ve been feeling that breaking up my 3 level demo to have a end point, then load something new felt cumbersome. I decided to delete the Boss Castle after finding all the coins, and add the Ice Cream level in its place.

Which means now having to go and recreate everything I already had worked on, including all the intricate FSM’s I had in place. All the carefully crafted mechanics now have to be copied over and I’ll have to re-tweak some of the gameplay now that there is new level geometry to contend with.

I think I’ll make it harder by adding new enemies too.