Yikes, no updates in about a week. I'm finding it difficult to balance work and working on my 1GAM project, so the reality is that I've made almost no progress. I have not abandoned this effort!
My current 'todo' is implementing a simple Maya tool so that I can attach custom metadata to nodes in the scene that get exported with the geometry data.
One such piece of metadata is to be able to tag a transform node as an 'asset root'. When I export a scene from Maya, I currently jumble all of the geometry into the scene into one geometry asset. This gets thrown into an asset pack file, and in the editor I can refer to assets within a pack file with/a/pathname/like/this.asset:some_asset. Tagging a node as an asset root will let me export more than one asset from the same Maya scene. I want this so I can put the physics and visual geometry of a level / object / whatever in the same Maya scene. This is a workflow issue that's just really tedious to manage currently.
The other piece of metadata is the name of the material to apply to the geometry. Currently the Maya exporter exports everything with one of a few different hacked-in materials. I've been manually fixing up the data after it comes out of Maya. Putting the material name on the node will be very helpful, so I can easily change geometry and there's nothing tedious in the way.
So, that's where I'm at. It's a bummer, for sure, but work is my priority. I think I'm only going to reasonably be able to spend time on this during weekends, and I'm not sure if I will finish something by the end of the month. I would very much like to, so that gives me 3 weekends (really only 2, but I'll cheat and say that I can spill into the weekend of Feb2+3).
So, what is the minimal 'todo' to get something playable in 3 weekends?
- get some sort of 'end level' implemented. The current level can easily be considered a maze, so let's say I'll plop down an exit trigger in the level. If you hit it, you beat that level.
- I can very easily churn out let's say 5 levels. Really, I can create a level in Maya, and get it working in game in 5 minutes.
- this COULD be all! in this state, the game is "find your way through the maze". I can package that up and call it good.
"stretch goal" (because kickstarter)
- polish the stomper hazard. In my last post I have the 'todo' to make this feel good. I'll need to implement level restarting (easy!) and then this could be a 2nd point of release. I can plop down a bunch of stompy's in the levels and call it good. Unfortunately I don't have a prefab system yet, so it'll be more than a few minutes to get these scattered in the level, since it's just a handful of components to attach to an object.
Really with the time left, I'm hesitant to reach any further than that. I'm in the home stretch now, so I need to wrap it up.
That said, there's a few different ideas for what to do for February:
- continue working on this game. Implement new hazards, polish it up better, release a v2
- start work on some brand new game idea
- spend some time doing engine tech (few things I could use immediately: prefab system, rotate+scale gizmos, undo)
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