atomic monster

I watched a youtube video the other night on a random shape generator that someone had made and got inspired.  After thinking about it as I watched the video I realized it would be pretty easy to do and so I quickly cobbled one together.  Right now it just has some very basic properties to adjust to get random shapes so the foundation is in.  It is already pretty fun to play around with and I have a few ideas to expand it a bit more. There is a common problem that any creative faces and that is the blank canvas or blank page.  The problem is that a blank piece of paper or computer screen can feel like this creative void.  The best solution is to get rid of the empty as quickly as possible.  Like looking at the clouds on a summer day you start to see shapes and patterns as you fill in the empty space.  Usually you will find something that sparks an idea.   The random shapes works in the same way only with a 3d mesh. ...

Wrapping up the last few images for the wireframe I hit the stride I should have had all along.  Even though the last 5 rooms were by far the hardest to block in there was a different feeling to the process of getting them up to speed.  While they were the hardest to get my self motivated to complete they were actually the easiest to complete.  Props and details will come as the gameplay gets solidified. The first quarter of the rooms felt really new and fresh so I kind of approached them as a standalone illustration and could easily blow 30-40 minutes on one.  By the time I got to the last 10% I was so worn out creatively that I just wanted them done so I would slap them together as fast as possible to convey the initial thinking. That really is the way that I should have approached all of them from the very start.  When you spend even 30-40 minutes on something like this you do tend to get a little attached.  That makes it so much harder to look ...

This is another old game concept image I did years ago.  This one still has some charm to it for me.  I don't know if its from the mix of pixel characters against a soft background or if its because seeing this takes me right back to wondering what the game would feel like to play.

All the rooms have been wired up together for a few days and you really do start to get a sense of place.  Even more so when the room thumbnails get updated to a first pass on the vector block out. At first I thought that 29 rooms would not be a ton of space for the game and that does feel some what true right now with nothing to do but move from room to room.  BUT I am starting to feel the art burn taking 29 rooms from super vague thumbnails to even fairly simple and empty feeling vector art block outs. I am looking forward to getting more time to do the art for the rooms but even getting them all to a basic level is taking a while.  I'm 23 in and only have 5 to go which is really good but at this point those last five feel like the first 23.  However I push on and with each new block out I get more excited to finish. 

Documenting your work is always a little boring and I'm really bad at it.  Regardless of the zombie like state of bordumb it puts me in I sat down last weekend and put a very basic manual together. Right after I wrapped it up I ended up adding a few new things and tweaked a few others in my engine.  And so begins the dance of documentation updating. I'm pretty stoked actually to have some documentation inplace for the engine and it's data structure.  The number of things in the engine has grown and there is a great deal that I had finished and not worked on that I had started to forget some of the details.  The manual sits at 98 pages right now which I'm kind of proud of as I have never written anything more then 20 pages.

I took some time last night and put together two templates for sketching out the rooms for the game.  One is a detailed page that I think I will use when working out more detailed ideas.  The other one is a page with 16 thumbnail screens with some room for a few notes. After I had a few sheets of the templates printed out I cracked open my sketchbook and did a mind map of locations.  I found this much easier doing it by hand instead of on the computer.  Another upside I had not thought about but now appreciate is that when doing this you are naming locations first.  This made it much easier for the next step. After I had a decent sized mind map of 29 rooms I figured I should do some quick and dirty thumbnails.  This was harder to get into at first and I found I had to come back to it the next day.  When I did come back to it everything came together really quickly.  There are some ugly thumbnails that are just a mess but it is enough for a fir...

As we head into the wire-framing section for the game there are some areas of the data structure that I feel are a little bit bloated and kind of sloppy.  I am happy with 99% of the structure but there are still some things that I keep thinking about that I would love to add and re-organize. One of the things that I would love to build out to be more powerful is the animation system.  Currently it is just a list of images and you cycle through them like a flip book.  But it would be much more powerful to be able to have multiple images with their own positions stored as frames.  We could even expand it out to trigger logic if we really wanted to but that is like feature creep on top of feature creep.  Changing the animation to work in this manner would not be very hard.  The part that I am mulling over right now is if I want to break the idea of splitting this up to multiple objects.  So one object that can use flip book animation and the other coul...