New year, new us!
Hi again everyone! Feels like it's been ages since we kept you guys updated (sure there's room for a date related 2020 joke somewhere here, but I've taken a vow not to do them haha), and looking at the dates it has been over a month! So why the long time between? So I won't excuse away not doing this sooner, and promise to be more consistent moving forward (new year, new me right?), but a mix of Christmas holidays, personal issues for both of us and financial stresses have made it hard to maintain a focus on our work over the last month. To be fair, we're both better off for the break and hopefully we can make the most of our situation moving forward.
In some quick and lighter news, I've had a bit of a break financially now, so will have more time to dedicate to programming and looking after my health and plan to make use of this to the fullest, starting in the next few weeks. Matthews is currently trying to resolve some issues with work, so in the mean time I'm going to support him in doing this, and hopefully we'll both be in a solid position next month.
A quick thing to note is that I've switched up the format a little bit now and will break down the headings into categories so that individual features and updates are a little easier to find. If you're only into certain things, or we have work that involves the two of us, you can easily find what you are looking for and the post so far seems to flow better, which I think is better for you guys. With that said, let's jump into the biggest thing that's happened over the Christmas period!
Voxel engine updates.
So based on our updates you guys might know that we were very close to getting the base voxel technology and brushes to working correctly aside from a major bit of problem code. The great news is that after trying to work on it for a few weeks, and after coming back from my little holiday I was able to fix it almost immediately. Amazing what a little refresher and some time to think can do for you eh?
As a really cool little side affect of this the smoothing code and brushes behave together in a more cohesive way, that in essence results in the brush strokes that you are doing having to be completely loaded in before smoothing takes affect. This means you can make larger sweeping changes at once, and once the engine has caught up, smoothing will treat the added mass as one "thing" (well not quite but that's how it appears). Once We have more to show on our KickStarter page I will release video demos of this in action.
The effects of using the brushes are actually extremely satisfying, and I cant wait to get the rest of the project to the point where we can get it into people hands to try for themselves. The only two features that I am mindful of as being outstanding at this stage, are a more complete UI for the editor (which will be built when we have more of a handle on the complete requirements for this) and also an additional performance feature, which due to the potential time-scale of this being implemented is being held off on until other things are more demo ready.
Prop and character design.
Myself and Matthews are currently in the process of negotiating a spec for the design of our in-game props and characters that we want inhabiting the world. Think of this process so far as a tug of war between visual freedom and tech requirements. It's important that I make sure that Matthews has all of the freedom he wants in terms of visual fidelity, while not stepping on my toes in terms of implementing other tech systems. One good illustration of this is interactivity between AI and navigation of voxel terrain. The last thing we want is for the models for example to be too large to navigate effectively, so either I set hard limits on his constraints or come up with a tech solution to the problem.
To aid this process Matthews has been doing a lot of concept work, which enables him to get a feel for what he wants and needs from our character models, as well as how he might want them to interact with our world. I've just been thinking about how certain implementations might be affected (good or bad) by what he's showing me. It's critical that we get this stage right now so that we don't cause ourselves major issues down the road. The last thing I want is to spend a month on a then scrapped code implementation. Designs and models are less of a problem as they can be more easily re-worked, but that's not to say that all would be lost, as certain code elements would be re-usable.
One other aspect of modelling that working on is getting some base foliage models built, as we really want something to tie the visual elements of the voxel engine together. This is in an effort to A: make it more complete visually, which should drive motivation for the project forward and B: to help us craft something more appealing for our crowdfunding work. We aren't shy here about the fact that this one feature has been prioritized for financial reasons, as we really want this project to succeed. Sometimes you have to forgo certain ideals to get to the end result you're after, and this is one thing we've compromised on.
Kickstarter.
Matthews has started looking at crowdfunding very seriously as we are gearing up to open our project to you guys in the not too distant future. Mainly he's been doing through research into other campaigns of a similar nature. More specifically he's been looking at successful ones to work out why they went so well, and the failures for some indication as what not to do. We really want to get this right, as it would really help support us during our time back at university come September, and allow us to continue our efforts on the project rather than have to work part-time.
On top of this he's also been looking into all of the media requirements for setting up the page, as from what he's discovered, it's not as straight forward as we had first assumed. You need a lot in our case, in the way of art, descriptions, clear milestones, screenshots, videos and so on. We had anticipated most of this, but not the scope. I think more than anything Matthews is gearing up for the workload, while I'm going to simultaneously work on implementing props into our engine and editor.
Future posts
I've said this again and again, but we're re-affirming our commitment to being more consistent. I don't just want you to think it's an empty goal, as it is something that we genuinely try to do. External factors often get in the way of our work, and unfortunately there have been occasions where this work has taken a back seat. We never stop working on it though, and as soon as we get the chance we get back on the saddle. It's just the nature of running a start-up with limited resources. I am in a more fortunate position now than I was before, so fingers crossed, this time will be the real break that I needed to make this work full-time.
I hope you've all had a great Christmas, and hopefully you're all caught up as to what we have been up to over the break. I know that we're really going to give it our all as part of the new year, and I would love to have you guys along for the ride. Have a great week all, and see you for the next update on Friday!