It crept up my spine like first rising vibes of an acid frenzy.

HST ‘Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas’

So. After returning to the old Ice Cream level to see if I can hammer it out – I had a realization that I have A MONTH LEFT on my self-imposed deadline. Not a good feeling when one also has the responsibility of getting 2 small humans and 1 normal sized one up, dressed, fed and out the door 5 days a week, running a household in dire need of repair and a neurotic cat with a 24/7 need for attention and affection.

It doesn’t help that this last part seems to bee the biggest hurtle when it comes to finishing this demo. The pacing seems off; tying the 3 quests together so it flows feels *wrong* – Its like I’m throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks; except I keep forgetting I coated the walls with NeverWet. In my desperation, I posted a gameplay video on the Playmaker Slack channel in hopes that I could get someone with sharp eyes to point out what was wrong with it.

Fortunately, the gang came up with some ideas – and between kids being off for a week for spring break; getting a nasty, kick my butt cold that has me sleeping more than I should and a lot of other distractions (like St. Patty’s day and a neighbor who makes excellent smoked brisket) – I *might* have a shot at getting my level sorted and looking decent.

So, in deciding that my ice cream level just didn’t have any pacing or flow, I decided to try and sculpt one out in Medium real quick and test my ‘fail fast / fail often’ skills to see how quickly I could prototype a level.

And, from a VR / gameplay standpoint; it worked.

Except, when I pulled it into Unity, my framerate dropped into the kinetoscope zone. A quick check of the profiler showed my physics was going haywire and drawcalls were through the roof. I was stuck trying to figure it out – and getting sucked away more and more because we’re getting ready for a kid’s birthday party for our second son; who is turning six.

On top of party prep – I got a missive from my sis, who said she might attend. This threw me into overdrive, because I could show off the VR re-creation of our childhood home; something I’ve been desperate for my family to try and see if it stirs the same feeling of ‘presence’ and nostalgia that it does for me.

But trying to upgrade from a Unity 5.x project to 2018 threw a $#!+ton of errors and I bailed because I saw a tweet about MakerX, which is coming up soon. And it hit me like a ton of bricks:

I’m not getting any serious work done on my demo.

So, back to my original design – enough messing around with stuff and let’s get it done.  The idea is to have a finished demo – release it into the wild and start working on the actual game. Enough. Too many distractions.

Perhaps I’ll be giving up social media for Lent.

So, finally the Winter Break has ended; kids back at school, the missus back at her job. Everyone rested and ready to get back to work.

And me?

I’m ready to get this demo DONE. So – a brief recap (in snippet form) of all things I’ve been up to.

I just recently got accepted to show my game at MakerX in Columbus in April – and that is my deadline. And while I have the 3rd level modeled and mostly textured and a lot of props in it – there is still a LOT to get done. Including a strong feature creep problem, as I realize I’m starting to gear up for making the actual *game*, and I keep thinking of things to add in.

This cute lil’ kitty is destined to be Booper’s sidekick. A travelling companion, friend, helper – and part of me that grew up on dark Disney movies wants to have something bad happen to him. If I had to suffer through Old Yeller and Bambi’s more horrific moments, I feel compelled to pass along similar gut-wrenching things to a new generation.  As a dad, I can always throw this design decision under the blanket clause, ‘it builds character’. The kitty was animated by the extremely talented Chuwawa, you should check out his work here.

I also got THREE pairs of Steam Knuckles controllers,

because I asked for one pair and they said, ‘if you could have more – how many pairs would you need?’ – I had said 2, thinking that included the pair I asked for initially, but Steam being Steam sent me 3 total. So any team members I add will be getting a nice bonus.

I also made an impulse purchase over the holidays:

Glycon VR Mocap system – I had gotten some $$ from the Mother-in-law as a Xmas gift and decided this was worth a shot as I’ve decided the Kinect mocap I was using really didn’t cut the mustard since it didn’t really tackle some of the finer movements I want (like finger controls) and since the dev said he was adding Knuckles support, it seemed like a no-brainer.

Plus, some of the characters that kiddo has drawn are fairly humanoid – hoping I can act out their animations (or even get them younguns to do it!) and give the characters a bit of their own personality.

Lastly – the final level has a bit of feature creep, but its a tough back & forth: try and wrap up the demo vs. try and gear up for making the actual game. Some of the mechanics will be needed, such as a day / night cycle. Others are just idea that keep popping into my head, like linking the 1st & 3rd levels with a character I call ‘Boo’ who warns you not to go in his cave, and if the player disregards that advice, the level will fill with slime, forcing the player to travel by the high ground.

Here are some of the highlights:

Which is nice and all, but I also have a (self imposed) April deadline – when I need to show this off at MakerX down in Columbus.

Better get to it, then.