…until the last day of school.

And family vacations (two of them) and summer camp (2 hours of driving each day) and play dates and social camp for my kid on the spectrum and swim lessons and..

WHEN does school start again!?!?

It’ll be just a bit better this year, if I’m fortunate enough to go back to GDEX; its slated for October. And not on my eldest’s birthday weekend, as usual. So, I’ll have a couple of extra weeks to polish the very basic first ‘real’ level of my game, which is currently somewhere in between crude stick figure storyboard sketches and whiteboxed with Legos and action figures.

One of my favorite gems of NYC was Stuyvesant Square Park, it was always well manicured, quite and held some manner of quintessential ‘park-ness’ that always appealed to me- so I thought I’d use it for a basis of my first level; where we meet Booper, see the kind of world he lives in and set up how he gets lost.

Seeing the start of this level makes me realize I will have to work a ton to get to the level of polish I’ve been demoing at the shows I have been attending. And having two boys and a filled activity schedule does not make for easy dev work. I’m dreading the idea of having to rouse myself at 5:30 in the AM to squeeze in any solid time of un-distracted work. I’m hoping that I can get the kids involved; having them record sound effects or draw me a prop that I need on the fly is a huge bonus.

Perhaps the kids are going to get a little more TV time than I’m normally comfortable with…

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of GDC talks about all this things I don’t know about game development and the wife noticed. After a while of watching my face wrinkle and morph as I puzzled over these talks, ranging from ‘WTF is this guy talking about!?!?’ to those random ‘Aha!’ moments; she threw me into a tailspin by asking: “What would you talk about, if someone ever invited you to do one of those?”

I really don’t know. I’m not anyone’s idea of a developer, not in the classical sense. What little attention I’ve gotten has been from sheer dumb random luck and based on when it looks like some these talke place – it might just be past my old man bedtime.

BUT – I do know this – if I ever do, I wanna just talk about being a dad, trying make a game whilst being a stay-at-home parent and I wanna do it in the style of Spalding Gray: a table, chair, mic and a glass of water – and just monologue about how I got to where I am-

So, I’m getting reeaally close to having my demo finished.

Thing is: I’m getting into such a state of Flow that I’m having a bit of a tough time with my non-stop brain coming up with more and more ideas. I’m totally cognizant of feature creep, but this is aesthetic stuff that really send the game to a whole new level – like making the flower / money level happen all at night.

I’m anxious to get this demo playtested, and with a little luck, I might just get some soon. As I was showing off some stuff on Facebook, I got an invite to join the Educators in VR Discord, and they created a whole new channel for playtesting, based on me stumbling about blindly asking if anyone wanted to play my little game. Looks like one of the teachers will be demoing it to a class full of kids on the spectrum; hopefully they enjoy it as much as my little guy does.

The other reason I want to finish is that I finally started making progress updating my project to the latest version of Unity – and I am so ready to play with ProBuilder, the newest version of Playmaker and nested prefabs. I did a quick experiment and was able to export a Probuilder mesh, pull it into Oculus Medium, sculpt it and put it back into Unity with very little fuss, and no scale changes.

I’m hoping this sort of whiteboxing method will help increase my productivity and reduce the time it takes to playtest my levels. I have rough ideas and when I sculpt them out in Medium, the scale is usually way off and I need to futz and kludge the mesh until it sorta work – with luck, this can eliminate the back and forth I’ve been doing. In the meantime, its back to the grind – and trying to figure out why any time I get a game breaking bug, my materials get deleted off my player: