The last few days have been pretty slow. I have a lot of deadlines for different applications due at the beginning of February, so have mostly been busy with writing and other bureaucratic activities.
I’ve also be refining and tweaking old levels. Between the last stable build (from around October) to now, I’ve gotten much better at making assets for the game, so a lot of the stuff from the levels I built six months ago no longer match the stuff I’ve been making. As such, I’ve had to go back and redo a lot of stuff. Some of these early levels are a real mess, so it’s taking me quite some time to fix them.
I’m also trying to improve the hierarchy of the project to manage assets a little better. Was speaking with a developer friend of mine yesterday evening, and he mentioned something along the lines of “naming things is 90% of development”. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there’s a lot of truth to that.
For me, the problem is that I do a lot of prototypes of different mechanics, which then get incorporated into the game without a restructure or rewrite. So basically, what happens is that the messy structures, which are good for prototypes since they’re not that big anyway, end up being carried over into my main project. For a while, I had like 20 scenes all named something like “TEST_001A”. After a few months, I couldn’t remember which ones were good or even what they were.
I’ve done a lot of cleanup already, but there’s still plenty to do. There are also still far too many “Misc” folders in the project…
Anyway, yesterday I did a bit of an overview of the project, basically going over all the content I’ve made and levels I’ve designed. The good news is that there’s a ton of stuff, and a lot of it really good. There are at least 4 very interesting mechanics that I’ve prototyped which have a lot of potential to become very interesting puzzles. The bad news is that much of the code base is a mess and is going to require a lot of work to get it solid.
Hopefully once I get these deadlines out of the way, I’ll be able to dive back in to more hardcore development.
Anyway, here are some images to give you a taste:
Also, starting to get somewhere with the portals:
