or, ‘Why is daddy cleaning the cat with a shop vac?’

Less than 2 weeks to go, and I’m gritting my teeth down to stumps. My extroverted child has taken an interest in science and has a bajillion-and-a-half questions about; volcanoes, black holes, the largest known star, earthquakes, tectonic plates, Marianas Trench and how the world will end.

I just wanna work on my game, kid.

And on top of that, with all the travels, playdates, family gatherings and other distractions – I’m super way behind on basic household chores. Like cleaning the gutters. Or the litter box.

And all of this is keeping from my game. In a BIG way.

In the meantime, my kid has been working overtime creating all kinds of new neat stuff, and I cannot keep up with photgraphing / scanning all of it. There is now a very large pile of 18″ x 24″ newsprint sketchpads growing on the couch in my office and its showing no signs of slowing. There have been all kinds of new dev experiences popping up and I’ve been struggling to find the time to apply to them all (especially since the wife is the better at editing than I am and wrangling her from her busy schedule is a task unto itself)

I did manage to find this lil’ guy in my son’s sketches and he set off a whole slew of creative ideas. He’s the guy skulking around the playground that kids should avoid. He’s the bad guy keeping a close watch on our young hero. I want him wandering around the level and if the play gets too close, he’ll slink away and hide. Eric from the Playmaker Slack channel suggests giving him some dynamic music that gets more threatening as the player gets closer.

Here he is – in game. I realized that his cigar smoke wasn’t parented just right, so that is now fixed and his cigar will puff properly now.

So, with my limited time (usually gotten by dragging myself out of bed early before anyone else wakes up) I’ve been trying to plug away at the first level by populating it with assets.

(Un)Fortunately for me, this is all I have time for.

Since the kids have been on summer break, I’ve been back to my old schedule of wake at 5:30am, coffee, email, biological functions (thanks, coffee), and work for an hour or so until tis time to wake up everyone for work/ summer camp/ speech therapy/ social camp/ swim lessons/ etc. Which entails dragging at least 2 people out of bed, ensuring they get dressed, make lunch for at least 2 of them, breakfast for all 3 of them all while dealing with a neurotic housecat that simultaneously wants to a) eat. b) be pet. c) go outside to kill things. All at once. And will meow like she’s Lassie lettimg me know that Timmy is in the well again AND the barn is on fire. At the same time.

So – I plug away, making assets as a way to keep moving forward and slowly adding them to my opening scene. Its gottent ot he point where I have to either repeat some of the building I have, or bribe my kids into drawing new ones with juice boxes & snacky bars.

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In an effort to help speed up my dev process, I tried using a ‘prefab brush’ I had downloaded as a way to quickly place assets in my scene – like flowers or trees, any sort of element that placing by hand would take waaaay to long with my limited attention. After struggling with the download (either my download was so old as to not work – or my version of Unity was) I ended up on the Asset Store and I found this inexpensive gem.

Its been an absolute steal at the price, and being able to mix and match prefabs, randomly size and rotate and save these brushes as a preset is exactly what I need – the biggest problem is I want to go back to my old demo and paint the $#!+ outta it now…

If nobody has ever said anything like this, allow me to be the first:

The biggest detriment to getting work done is the vacation.

There, Now you can quote me. Got back from a trip to Cancun with the missus over a week ago – and while it was lovely, relaxing, restful; I just can’t get back into the swing of working on my game.

Perhaps the time off has my mind & body yearning for a respite. Perhaps its now that we’re in full on summer vacation mode and I’ve got 2 kids, swim lessons, summer camp, social camp, torrential rainfall causing massive amounts of lawn growth, speech therapy, playdates and the desperate need to get my house cleaned and some on the table for dinner – might have something to do with my inability to get something done.

Trying to get even a bit of work done with kids around the house is like trying to brush your teeth while eating Oreos. If I sneak away to work on something; it becomes the most important thing e v e r that I come see the latest Lego creation my kid has made. Or they decide to start smacking each other with electrical cords.

But – I’m slowly getting back into it – plucking away at a problem I had right before we left; I managed to get a car I had modeled out actually moving around the level and a few more buildings done:

Hopefully when I get a chance to look through the sketchbooks the kids had while on vacation they’ll have some more inspiring work in them.

…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: