so it's the end of the month and that means time for the second gamedev challenge game.
uhhhhhhhh about that
okay i so started on some kinda urban dead zombie thing and got the rudiments of movement working, but then i had one really aggravating day of trying to work with the rendering framework i'd made so far and basically gave up on it for the rest of the time. so that's not great. (the 'final' version is a tiny bit more advanced than that demo, but not really any more complete.)
i actually ended up working on the nemesis procedural generation code more -- adding in nil values (because there was no way to say 'generate x or nothing'; it was always 'generate x or y'), getting nested field lookups working, and adding in syntax/generator support for invoking further subgenerators. i wrote up a data file for procedurally-generating demons, maybe for hell game (here's a sample output), but currently just for kicks.
lessons learned: uhhhh don't just give up on things. or rather, there is a reason why i haven't had good luck with doing code or writing sprints, and that's because i get disheartened and give up easy, and probably it is better to think of things as just two weeks of messing with library code, rather than as gamedev. idk. the upside of this, though, is that if/when i totally fail at a given challenge, the two week deadline kind of limits how much damage i can do.
anyway the next thing i'm gonna try my hand at is some kinda world-generation stuff. not "procedural" precisely, so much as like, letting you put down some landscape-shaping things and see how the simulation evolves over time. the big thing i'm worried about with that is that it's gonna require some pretty substantial rendering structure, so i don't know how much of the time is gonna be taken up by working on that vs. actually doing any game stuff.
uhhhhhhhh about that
okay i so started on some kinda urban dead zombie thing and got the rudiments of movement working, but then i had one really aggravating day of trying to work with the rendering framework i'd made so far and basically gave up on it for the rest of the time. so that's not great. (the 'final' version is a tiny bit more advanced than that demo, but not really any more complete.)
i actually ended up working on the nemesis procedural generation code more -- adding in nil values (because there was no way to say 'generate x or nothing'; it was always 'generate x or y'), getting nested field lookups working, and adding in syntax/generator support for invoking further subgenerators. i wrote up a data file for procedurally-generating demons, maybe for hell game (here's a sample output), but currently just for kicks.
lessons learned: uhhhh don't just give up on things. or rather, there is a reason why i haven't had good luck with doing code or writing sprints, and that's because i get disheartened and give up easy, and probably it is better to think of things as just two weeks of messing with library code, rather than as gamedev. idk. the upside of this, though, is that if/when i totally fail at a given challenge, the two week deadline kind of limits how much damage i can do.
anyway the next thing i'm gonna try my hand at is some kinda world-generation stuff. not "procedural" precisely, so much as like, letting you put down some landscape-shaping things and see how the simulation evolves over time. the big thing i'm worried about with that is that it's gonna require some pretty substantial rendering structure, so i don't know how much of the time is gonna be taken up by working on that vs. actually doing any game stuff.