Timing is hard :/
So again, we've had a bit of a weird week last week, which is why this is going up a bit late, but rest assured I am working hard to catch up on the work I've missed. I'm really putting in the hours now to get us back to where we need to be, and we should be in a more comfortable position again next week. We're right up against the wall in terms of the development livestreams going up on YouTube (as we ran out in the backlog), but I'm now using this as a drive to get more of them done. Josh has been doing a great job on getting his video production pipeline up to speed, and it's me that needs to get faster with content creation. It's going to be tough, but worth it. That said, let's get onto what actually happened last week!
Kickstarter and events.
So a topic that comes up frequently for us is the talk of Kickstarter. We're really hoping we have a solid chance at getting close to a launch by the end of the month, but we're not set on this date for a number of reasons. Work of course continues on the prop system, which I'll talk about shortly and we have a couple of dates coming up that we're also preparing for.
One such date is a meeting with our project planning mentor, which will give us a good basis for our info-graphic and schedule content for the page and project as a whole. The second is our internal business presentation which will help us solidify our business pitch. We're being judged by a small group of investors in addition to our normal team, who are looking to give some of us a small sum of seed money to help us get off the ground. We'll be using this as a drive to make sure our pitch is really solid, which is also important in helping us prepare for our upcoming Insomnia Games Festival plans.
With all of this work approaching, Matthews has been planning out our script for the Kickstarter page itself. Hopefully once all of this comes together we'll be halfway there to a complete campaign page. We have also discovered you can open these pages up privately first, so we'll be sharing with a small group of people to test and provide feedback before going live officially. During our private phase we'll likely set an official date for the big launch, which is really exciting for us and has been a long time coming.
Prop system.
So prop system work is going well, with a few small (but key) features coming along nicely. Something that I've been investigating this week is physics integration, but it has been quite a challenge so far. The existing prop model implementation is using a system not typically used by unique game objects, and so resources are limited on how to do this using C++ code (and believe me, I've looked everywhere). I'm going to keep on hammering though, dig a little deeper and push through it. I'm also attending a programming help session at my university as soon as it is scheduled and I have a location. Apparently there will be some experienced UE4 users there, although I'm not 100% what their level or area of expertise will be yet.
I've also started looking at how to do prop placement so that it isn't just directly in front of the camera, and is instead on the voxel you're looking at. I might compromise, and keep the existing implementation too, so that with a scroll of the mouse you can both place objects on the floor and suspend them in the air. Work hasn't continued too much on this yet as I've been busy personally, hence part of the catch-up.
Barclays' Gaming Frenzy event.
So another reason both of us have taken a bit of time off of work this week is because of an event that popped up a bit out of the blue for us. This event was somewhat of a networking event, kind of a business event and also an advertisement for various Barclays ventures. It wasn't really what we were expecting based on the advertised listing, and I personally thought it was a bit confused and without direction, so we left rather quickly. It was also hard to really find anyone there that could have been useful for us to talk to other than people we've actually already met from our office/business space. I did learn from it however, that Barclays offer various business start-up services which may be of use should we need it.
3D modelling and video work.
Lastly, Matthews has continued his efforts in some demo models for the prop system, which are nearing a stage he is happy with. He's still experimenting with styles and shape languages for the trees, but as soon as they're passable he'll give them to me to import into the engine. He's been doing this alongside the video editing work he's been doing for me, and I have to say I'm proud of him for the work he's been doing recently, as it's all been great!
Fin.
So again that about wraps it up for last week. Sorry it's late! I've not gone into detail what we've done so far this week so I actually have something to talk about next time, but I'll be sure to let you know what we get up to soon. As always, have a lovely week, and see you again shortly :)