Game Development So Far
This week has been quite busy as I’ve taken on quite a few side tasks in terms of building up the Gym Empire community on top of the existing work tasks. Ultimately I’ve ended up focusing on just one of the tasks I’d planned as the visual side of things tends to take quite a bit longer. At the end of the day if it doesn’t look right it can kill the whole vibe!
- Build external environments – I held off this task to focus on character models
- Create varied character models – This task has taken the majority of my focus this week and to be honest I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it! I’ve been modifying the base models in blender to create variations in the characters. This is great fun but it takes quite a bit of time tinkering to get to the right look. I’ve also separated the skin textures and hair models from the main models so that they can all be mixed and matched in the code. This means the difference between have 8 reusable base characters compared to 100+ individual characters. You can imagine how much time that is going to save!
- Update UI and menus – I held off this task to focus on character models
Other Developments
As well as working on the character models this week I also wrote the latest update article on IndieDB. I had a bit of a douche moment with that though. Just as I was getting some decent traffic from Reddit to the article I accidentally deleted it from IndieDB! That will teach me to watch my fat fingers whilst I’m handling marketing from my phone! It was recovered just an hour later though so not too many down votes from Reddit thankfully… Speaking of Reddit volatility, I actually got myself banned from the Gaming subreddit! Turns out they count self-promotional posts across all the different subreddits. I had posted to the Tycoon, Gym Empire and Gaming subreddits which breached their self-promotion limit, a bit of a strange policy if you ask me but you live and learn. To be fair to them though, I explained my innocence and genuine intentions to them and they lifted the ban within minutes. As an avid gamer at heart I’d hate to be banned from the Gaming subreddit!
As well as IndieDB I also completely overhauled the Chronik Spartan Discord server. Until recently I wasn’t really active in the server and I knew I wasn’t really handling it properly. To be honest I didn’t really know what to do with it. After watching a great GDC video about the Descenders Discord server I was ignited with ideas! I went about completely over hauling it with a plan for how I will handle it from now on and I’m so glad I did. In the few days since the changes I’ve had more genuine interaction with you guys than I have ever been able to have with any other social media platform. I’m loving the direct feeling that Discord has and I already feel like I’m getting to know the current members a lot better. For anyone who hasn’t joined up yet I really hope you can pop on over. It’s got a really nice intimate vibe and to reward everyone you get exclusive access to beta testing for Chronik Spartan Games. To add to the fun there’s three teams Wolf, Psycho and Raven. The teams get to compete in challenges to earn cool rewards and get to engage in a bit of fun trash talk along the way. Also it’s the most up to date place to get moment by moment info on my current game development. You can join by following the invite link:
Hope to see you in there!
Time Management
So back to the plan. This week’s main task will be purely character model development, however I’ll break that down into sub tasks:
- Create all variations of hairstyles and facial hair for male and female
- Create all skin variations for male and female
- Ensure colour combinations of hair etc are aesthetically pleasing
- Start looking at clothing
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
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