Posted January 05, 2023 by methodia
I promise. This time it really is relatively short, but it does relate to the game.
As I said in the previous post, in the downtime between Phases I'm putting together a quick game project. The objective was to put together something using the skills I've got so far to use as a socially acceptable demo of 9 months of learning. Plus I wanted to do something wildly different from Running of the Wolves for a few weeks.
Well, that's certainly succeeding.
I'm working on an online pvp deathmatch arena game. The last few days has mostly been framework for the online stuff, but it's revealed some big problems for Running of the Wolves. For background, RotW is quite literally the first game I've made, so the whole thing is learning stuff on the fly. Working on this little game has shown that the way I've set up pretty much everything is totally the wrong wqay to go about it and in most cases, I've done things in a way that is so much harder than it needed to be.
For example, when you take damage, there's a thing that sends the damage to the right character, processes it and does a buch of other bits to determine who and what caused it, how much, etc. There's 1 single node that does most of that.
So far this stuff has taught me that I need to redo a lot of stuff. Main Menu, characters, loading screens, save/load, etc etc. There's so many core things that I obviously used the wrong tutorials to learn.
I'm still working out the ramifications for this. Obviously a lot of the game stuff needs updated. The question is when. There's a lot that needs updated. Doing it prior to Phase 2 makes sense. The sooner it's done, the less I have to fix. If I keep adding to the old stuff then refactoring gets to be a much larger job. But it would also massively impact on when Phase 2 starts.
A few times in the past when I've either made a breakthrough or a complete fucking mess, I've toyed with the idea of starting the game fresh. Now I have the game at the end of Phase 1 I could use it as reference, move over the levels fully built and just redo the framework around them. Avoid importing stuff that isn't needed. A clean slate. Right now, it's seriously tempting.
*edit*
Apologies if the site informed you that this was posted twice. Somehow I managed to post to my profile instead of the game. No idea how that happened, but it's fixed now.