So yesterday’s attempt at a progress update turned into a story about seeing the northern lights, I’ll try and stay on track today!
Game Development So Far
Progress over the past couple of weeks has been steady but slow. There’ve been a few family events that have been going on which has meant I’ve not had as much spare time to dedicate to game dev. But I’ve continued to maximise my lunch times and any other spare moments I find to keep progress moving along.
A couple of weeks ago I was commenting on how pleased I was with the swift progress towards getting animation into the game. And although those initial steps, which I thought would be the hardest, turned out to be a lot less time consuming than I initially thought, two/three weeks on I still find myself working away at the animation side of things. The tricky part is in ensuring all the individual animations work well together in the 3D environment. In my task list I just have two separate tasks listed:
- Animation
- Get characters to sit on equipment
To just read those two tasks it doesn’t initially seem like there is a lot to them. But they are both actually very large areas of work that could each be broken down into multiple sub tasks. My intent with the task was to break it down into big handfuls that I could track my progress against rather than list every single step in atomic detail. Having said that it can be frustrating not being able to tick a task off even though you know you are working through it at a decent pace. I’ve not completed the animation task however I’ve started to also work on the “Get characters to sit on equipment task” (which actually covers more than just sitting on equipment.
Within the animation task, some of the sub tasks I have been working on have included:
- Transitioning a character from a walking to an idle to a working out state
- Enabling a character to perform activities whilst holding equipment e.g. dumbbells
- Adding in collision detection for characters and objects
- Providing AI for a character to avoid collision through route planning
Within the sit on equipment task, some of the sub tasks have included:
- Sitting and lying down on equipment
- Stepping up onto equipment
- Controlling the orientation of the character on equipment
- Handling timers for exercise duration to take into account time it takes for character to “get onto” equipment
Each of those subtasks are at different levels of maturity, with the route planning, sit/lie on equipment tasks and exercise timers at the lower maturity levels. A couple of times I have been tempted to move on to different tasks and come back to the animation later to ensure I don’t get stuck on any one area, but I’m deciding to persist with the animation until it is at a high level of maturity. The reason behind this is that when the animation is fairly mature, I’ll then be at a point where I can make an initial trailer and screenshots. This will allow me to put a coming soon page up on Steam and open up the awareness of Gym Empire to a larger audience.
Having a coming soon page up for the longest amount of time possible is something I’ve learnt is very important since releasing Glo. I only had a coming soon page up for two months with Glo and the number of wishlisters reflected that short time period. I truly believe that the more time you provide for people to organically find out about your game the better chance you have of increasing your day one sales.
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.