Friday, September 2, 2011

One step forward...

As usual, life has been keeping me busy. I've settled on Unity3D, as it appears to offer everything I need, and it even offers the ability (if I pay extra for the Pro license) to provide add-on packs. I might take advantage of that later to provide custom downloadable content as part of a Kickstarter reward as a way of getting a bit of funding to get the game built, but we'll have to see whether that will really work.

So with restarting the graphical portion, I've been taking stock of where I am with my game. It turns out my work over the past year hasn't amounted to much -- Tom's artwork (which is awesome, of course), a bunch of concepts I mostly had sorted out about 15 years ago, and some pretty basic logic, including my own implementation of A* pathfinding. (The pathfinding is lifted pretty much directly from an AI programming book I own. So the most complicated thing I have isn't even my own idea.)

I'm taking a couple weeks away from game development to focus on a few other things, but I'm hoping that by the end of September I'll be back hard at work. And then I need to start really pushing on this, because I have some very tentative plans to share a booth at next year's PAX with Carl Hume, developer of Kingdoms of Arcania (link currently busted but hopefully back online soon). Before that, I need to find out how much the booth costs and when exactly we'd need to commit to it, so that we know what our timetable is. I doubt either of us will be making any money off PAX, but it seems like a fun excuse to go visit our tribe, and by splitting a booth we'd be able to occasionally spell each other off and take turns wandering PAX. In order for that plan to have even the pretense of making sense, I need to make sure my game's in a condition to show off by the time PAX rolls back around.

Speaking of PAX: I think anyone who reads this has already likely heard all about my trip to PAX, but I'll recap it here just in case... PAX was awesome. No, seriously, awesome. In every way. I honestly can't think of anything I didn't enjoy about PAX, even waiting in line. (There are some things I might have enjoyed more were they done differently, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy things the way they were.) Everyone there -- literally every single person I interacted with or even saw in the convention center -- was in a good mood and having a good time and being considerate towards their fellow con-goers and just generally being decent human beings. If you're a gamer, go to PAX.