Last week saw quite a bit of decent progress on Gym Empire both from a technical point of view as well as the momentum I’ve managed to pick up.
This time last month (and the tail end of last year) I felt like I was up against a brick wall with every development task on Gym Empire. At best it felt like a slow struggle. And that was really starting to have an effect on my motivation for the project. I was struggling to find the same desire I had with Glo. But my philosophy is to never give up and keep on chipping away. And I’m pleased I did! As of last week it really feels like I’ve finally got that momentum going again, making little bits of progress each day whether its tasks completed or learning. And I can feel the passion starting to burn again!
Saturday saw a milestone achievement on Gym Empire I felt I was never going to reach and if I did ever reach it I thought I would really struggle with; animation. Up until now I’ve put off the animation side of the game as I wanted to make sure some fundamental mechanics were in place. Since producing the road map to completing Gym Empire I’ve had a clearer vision of when I would begin to address animation. And that day came on Saturday.
I started the morning excited, but apprehensive as to how much difficulty I’d face. Long story short 2 hours later I had my clients walking around and running on treadmills! I thought it would be weeks before I’d get to that point but it turns out there are some fantastic resources available to help with animation!
Mixamo https://www.mixamo.com/ is a brilliant tool to get an already rigged model animated. Granted it doesn’t have every single animation I’m after but it’s been an amazing starting point and has let me focus on the details of coding the animation in Unity. With a bunch of animations now created I’m able to spend this week fine tuning the code to stitch those animations together and make things look nice. It’s a great feeling to be back in this position and the end is definitely something I can now visualise much more clearly. Always remember to keep chipping away because determination is the key to success (even if it’s just a little win)!