Game Development So Far
Another week goes by, another week focusing mainly on animation. When I first started the animation for Gym Empire I thought “this is easy” how wrong I could be! It’s the little things that throw the spanner in the works. Anyway let’s get into last weeks tasks:
- Refine entire animation code – I did a lot of refinement of the animation code and it’s all working a lot smoother now. However I was still having MatchTarget issues. It just wasn’t doing what I wanted! So in the end I decided to go about creating my own code to handle the alignment of character to equipment. I’m quite pleased with the outcome and it’s a lot more controllable than MatchTarget, however it still just doesn’t look right! So I decided to take a step back and rethink my options. I’ve now come up with a totally different approach to the animation of the characters which is going to make life a LOT easier! I’ll go over it in more detail in a separate blog but I can safely say this part of the animation is now done… finally!
(NOTE: The models still need clothes and hair adding 😉 )
- Further refine staff behaviour – having spent even more time on the animation than I expected, yet again staff behaviour and staff icons have taken a back seat. They’ll have to move over to this week again.
- Add staff icons – see above
- Post update to IndieDB – I posted an update on the character style I’ve picked. I’m quite pleased with this article and feel it gives a good indication of the visual direction I’m going for
Other Developments
Last week I also started trying polyphasic sleep. It’s basically attempting to minimise the amount of time you need to sleep by maximising your ability to get to the deep part of sleep (REM). An average day might look like:
- 00:00 – 04:00 Sleep
- 05:40-06:00 Nap
- 12:40-13:00 Nap
- 18:00-18:20 Nap
I tried it for about five days and I certainly did get a lot more time to code on Gym Empire however I don’t think it’s worth it. I believe there are too many long term health risks that could be involved and that’s not what game dev is about. It did get me into a better routine of getting up on time as I’d been slipping recently, hitting the snooze button too often, however a good old fashioned circadian rhythm feels much more natural! I was going to write a post about it but there’re so many out there already there’s no point.
Time Management
This week’s tasks are:
- Further refine staff behaviour
- Add staff icons
- Refine equipment code
- Build up more UI
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
Join the discord for exclusive beta access Chronik Spartan Discord.
For news and updates on Chronik Spartan games and future blog posts please subscribe.
You can support Chronik Spartan Games and get exclusive access to in depth behind the scenes news and other awesome rewards at Patreon.