So, you’d think by giving up drinking for Lent, I’d be better rested, mind sharper, body less prone to aches and generally feeling better and thinner, right?

You’d be wrong.

Felt this way after quitting smoking – there wasn’t any energy boost, no taste buds came snapping back and I still felt as crappy as always, exercise or no exercise. When I stopped imbibing the night before Ash Wednesday, wifey dear commented that the pounds would melt away and I’d stop bitching about the ‘dad bod’ Well, after the 1st week and I dropped 2 pounds, its already started to creep back up – so much for that.

See that little  &@#% fish?

You’d think that was an easy, quick, and painless thing to setup, eh? A 5 minute piece of fluff to add to my level and give it a little ‘juice’. (as an aside, I’m reading a ton of dev blogs and a lot of them seem to focus on adding this mythical ‘juice’ that will guarantee instant sales, clear up bad breath and acne and magically make you more appealing to every gender)

I quick took the scanned image, did my usual Inkscape vector drawing> to .svg. > to Blender> extrude / texture > export to Unity.

This is where the fun begins.

I slapped a quick FSM on it – wait a random time and apply force to launch him in the air, wait for him to come back down – repeat. Simple right? No matter what I did, he kept launching into the stratosphere. NASA wishes they could launch things so easily. Making sure gravity was turned on, played with the force variables, lowering the amount of force until it just flopped to the ground like a drunk frat boy.

OK – time for a different approach. ANIMATE the ^&%$#%er. Slapped a animator controller on it and decided, hey – Unity has a panel for creating animations, let’s use that! Quick added a upward motion, quick added a little rotation so it looks like he’s popping out of the water and diving back in. Slap on the ol’ Vive and BAM! Fish outta water! Jumps and returns to the same spot! GREAT!

Except when I decided, ‘put him in the water and let’s see him majestically leap out like a noble salmon swimming upstream!’ Except every time I moved him and hit ‘play’ – he’d go right back to his original start point. And no matter what I did – parent him to an empty, check (or uncheck) root motion, apply transforms to prefabs – nothing worked.

And it bothered me for days. WHY? WHY? WHY? Why should such a simple thing be so difficult to achieve? Why does game logic always seem so contrary to my way of thinking? I took a little time off from dev work to plod forward on the triptych for my in-laws (which is coming along nicely, thank you) and ponder this problem, occasionally taking time to  try and re-try ideas to get ol’ Fishy McFishface acting like a proper %@#% cartoon fish.

I dunno what got me to the tenuous leap of logic, but it wasn’t until days later and I was putting Number One Son to bed and it hit me: I keyframed his rotation AND position – he literally was told to animate in THE SAME SPOT HE KEPT GOING BACK TO. I told sonny boy that daddy was dense as a brick and deserved to be slapped upside the head (he declined) and after night-nights I rushed to the ol’ Render Machine 2000 to remove the offending keyframes and prove my hypothesis correct.

Well, it sorta worked. Ol’ Fishface was no longer next to the player when I hit play, but he moved to what looked like an arbitrary part of my level. It wasn’t until I was looking at his transforms that I realized it was moving to 0,0,0. Annnd looking at the animator tells me that it only accepts X, Y, AND Z – so it defaults if keyframes are missing.

OK- if THAT’S how you want to play – then fine. I drag the fish over to where I want him to be – add keyframes to his X & Z and finally, at long last he was where I wanted him, and I don’t care if he is a single-use asset- it works and I ain’t screwin’ with it.

Next time I’ll just animate him in Blender.

So – the video of the interview went live:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8yARXs9MNE

Sadly, the video cuts out at 18 minutes and the audio quality dips, but I think the general concept of the game gets out and it makes me excited to do another one. In the meantime – I’ve been struggling with the twin issues of audio + PlayMaker and kids birthday parties…

It seems odd that trying to use different actions to do the exact same thing has different effects – using PlayMaker, specifically the actions of ‘Play Sound’ and ‘Audio Play’ would cause me serious tension headaches. I was trying to create a ‘music manager’ where I’d play random songs in the game level. (as a side note – if I do get funding, the 1st thing I’m adding is a license to the album “Dorica” from the Free Music Archive; it simply fits the game – perfectly)

When I tried to use the action, ‘play random sound’ my music was extremely quiet, and the further the player got from the audio source, the quieter it got… No matter what I did, I could not get the sound to behave – despite the interwebs insistence that changing my audio source to 2D would magically make my problems disappear. It wasn’t until I changed it to ‘audio play’ did my songs suddenly ring out – almost a little too loudly. I quickly rolled a random # generator and assigned the numbers to songs and BAM – music manager – done.

It was nice to get that off my plate because the weekend is going to be a non-stop blur of kiddy-mayhem-at-the-house-of-inflatables and cheap pancakes at the local maple syrup VFW slice of Americana. (not to mention: Daylight Savings Time) Its also going to be difficult to put game dev on mental hold, because the wife just upped the game, more specifically – the plot, substantially.

Just as we were packing off to bed, we got to chatting about little elements, like my brother – who recorded a couple of lines akin to a narrator, very much in the tone of Alec Guiness, and its struck a tone – how we can turn this demo into a full fledged game. We don’t want it to be ‘scary’, even though it deals with a child being lost and separated from parents. And out of the blue she dropped it on me like a ton of bricks:

The kid is on the way to the park and wanders off, and each ‘level’ is a different part of the park, just exaggerated by imagination – and when kiddo is reunited with parent, its simply this epic adventure that was in the kid’s mind…

The desert level could be the sandbox, the hilly grasslands could be the garden surrounding the park, the water levels are the sprinkler play areas… We discussed different playground elements and how to make them levels: teeter-totters, roundabouts, slides – all of them could incorporate different mechanics to keep the game interesting and fun.

I just gotta make it.

So, between furiously trying to finish the triptych for my Bro / Sis-in-laws, I’ve been furiously trying to get my demo level completed. Hearing that Steam is ending Greenlight,  I’ve got even greater incentive to get my Steam page up and running.

After showing off my level during a birthday party for my youngest (all the kids, and most of the adults know about my Vive and want to play in between cake and presents) and got tons of feedback. Its amazing how quickly a 9 year old can be a developers harshest critic. It also helps when people just ‘get’ the game – the mechanics, the milieu, the theme. One of the toughest aspects to grapple with is allowing the player to turn. Is it static and no turning; use a control to turn – like Google Earth VR where you can use the grip controls to spin the earth around? Or as another player suggested – only turn around when whatever ‘quest’ requires a different point of view?

Which leads into more questions: how do I guide my player? My son hasn’t been exactly forthcoming with sketch requests. On my demo, I’d love a simple sign at the start that directs the player to go and find the king… except my kids are just like me: stubborn as all get out.

I am taking the various photos of artwork and teasing out all the letters to upload to MyScriptFont, a site where you can generate a TTF font of your handwriting – I’m using it for a GUI during the ‘sock hunting quest’.

Many questions – little time for dev work.

So, out of the blue, I get a text from an old friend back in NYC. He had seen the post I put on FaceBook and wanted to chat. I was busy packing up kiddo #2 for a playdate at the library (a long overdue one, to boot!) and said I could chat – but quietly.

We got to our playdate, and #2 son was greeted with smiles and a card made just for him (it amazes me just how insanely cute and adorable kids can be right before they spill oil based enamel paint all over your vintage 1986 IBM ‘M’ keyboard…) and I explained that I needed to take an important call… like the one coming right this second.

My buddy and I exchanged several foul mouthed greetings (ye gods I miss some aspects of living in the city – cussing is elevated to an artform there…) and he quickly got down to business: he loved the video and has some people he wants to show it to. Moreover, needs documentation and whatever else I can put together to see if we can possibly get funding and wants to get a broader idea of what I’m trying to accomplish. He likes the idea that its for VR and we talk about full on VR rigs and mobile headsets.

Jeez, I’m trying to figure out how to make this into a game- that’s what I’m trying to accomplish.

But – we talk, brainstorm, catch up, cuss some more and now I’m committed to creating a prospectus and perhaps more to see if this idea has legs. In the process, we inadvertently come up with a whole slew of ideas, many of which are waaaay beyond my paltry skills (I love the idea that we can use the controllers to ‘draw’ in the world to help solve problems, like drawing a bridge to get across a canyon…) and I relegate them to expansion pack ideas – or sequels.

Its also putting pressure to get a demo level DONE. While looking at what I had in the level already, plus looking at the drawings floating in the file (plus some ideas from the wifey) I took the castle already in my scene, took a drawing of a character with a crown and tossed him in Spriter and took other elements to make a ‘quest’ of sorts: collect 5 stinky socks, and the king will let you pass through the castle:

I’m leaning away from trying to take drawings that #1 son did and extruding them into game levels, it looks wrong somehow and doesn’t seem to convey the same atmosphere as the open world does (in the video, there is a section of white blocky areas bordered in blue that were the old style)

I’ve been finding that the sprites in a 3D world are creating a bit of a headache – a lot of the static background props were slowing down my framerate, so I traced them in Inkscape and exported .svg files into Blender, extruded them and slapped the drawings back on as texture maps – which made it possible to rotate the quest items (socks) as soon as I can figure out why my axis isn’t aligned properly.

I’m hoping to have a level properly in shape and running in a week or two, release it as a beta for playtesting and figuring out problems and within a month, get a demo out on Steam.