Monday, June 8, 2015

Taking a Break

So I was stressing out quite a bit about basically finishing the whole game this week and did quite a bit of work in the beginning of the week, but then I decided to take a break.

I was stressing out and I have not had any vacation for a while so I decided to instead relax my deadline trying to hit the Jurassic World release and instead take a step back and be sure I don't run myself into the ground and that I actually create a good game, now that I have put so much time into it.

So since I had just bought a fancy new GeForce 970GTX I played a bunch of games and relaxed with my girlfriend.

So I played a bunch of Batman - Arkham Origins, I played through most of Broken Age, I tried out Assassin's Creed IV - Black Flag and I played some Hearthstone.

And all of it was great. I actually don't play games much for someone trying to be a game developer. I actually have this stupid stigma built into my brain that it's a bit of a time waster - more than movies or books - even through I know that games is an art form in their own right and have loads of other benefits, like improved motor skills and cognitive skills that other entertainment does not have. So I'm glad I spent a bit more time playing and I'll try to keep it up for a while and finish some good games, I have The Witcher 2 and 3 to finish as well.

I'll be back with an update again when I've had a bit more time to relax and maybe reconsidder the scope of the game and a new schedule.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Project Happy - Dev Diary 7


Well better late than never.
Missed two Sundays. Not so good.
Well I ended up getting pretty sick and then I got a bit stuck with the game.
BUT! I have taken the rest of this week off so I will be working on the game a lot this week which is indeed very needed if I still want the game to be finished around the 12th of June.

So my last task was to make the game run well on Android and I have definitely managed that.
I ended up stripping off a lot of the cool effects and scaling back on some of the models and textures. I found out that the terrain was causing a very high poly count and so was the water. The fade out effect of the trees when you go behind them also seemed to cause the fps to drop dramatically.
What remains that is really expensive rendering wise is the drop shadows and the light cookie (the effect of light coming through tree branches. I think I'll end up with no shadows. This is a shame, but the game still looks OK as long as the light cookie is there.

Other than all the optimization stuff I:


  • Implemented the Triceratops.
  • Setup a start menu, pause menu and game over menu.
  • Made some better UI textures.
  • Implemented a point counter.
  • Made sand textures for the terrain.
  • Made a temporary sky box.
And here is how it is looking at the moment:


So I might have scaled back the graphics a bit too much, but I can always put stuff back in if I have the performance headroom.

So for the week I will have to be very productive if I'm going to finish this off soon:

  • Make a velociraptor.
  • Make tourists you can eat.
  • Make eggs you can collect.
  • Make missing animations.
  • Make a real skybox.
  • Decide on a Final name
  • Finish all the UI.
  • Probably way more stuff
So if I manage all this in this week then I'll have next week to polish things off and implement Play Games services and in app billing.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it :P.