LAST LIGHT

CONCEPT:

- I walk a lonely road

- On the boulevard

- Of broken prototypes

What went right:

AI has sped up the time it takes to generate startup code.. 

This was a strange game to make. I had to backpedal a few times to get to where I needed to be.

What went wrong:

There's no such thing as a catch all controller that can do everything. Every character has it's own rig and design per object, so every character needs to be designed with that in mind. This is tedious and expensive, so careful attention needs to be made to each rig to make it work. 

It's possible to build a generic controller that will perform well across generally human rigs… but anything stylistic cannot be reused and will have to have it's own animation set.

For 3D models, this means, using the same model over and over again has an advantage of consistently building upon a standard animation set. 

For any special projects, every 3D model has to have it's own motion set. Ripping stuff off the asset store and hoping it will turn out alright will never happen.

That being said, how do you build a symbiotic first and third person controller? You start with one target rig and build your entire asset library off of it. Every model you design has to obey that target rig so all of the animations line up. It's that simple. 

I got a little trigger happy with the asset store this week and wasted a lot of money. I don't think there are too many more libraries to explore at this point… it's just a matter of implementing existing systems that I already know.

IK is a good solution for remapping generic animations that are close. If you're doing anything in first person, just don't even render the person. Or make a separate hand rig for the FPS sections. Going for a contiguous 3rd person to 1st person model is a dumb idea and poses way too many technical problems to make it worthwhile. It's better to build something simple that doesn't break. 

Organizing audio is tough. I think the best method is to keep making projects and building up a library. Once it's cataloged, I have an easy way to access everything. The problem becomes managing special cases and 3D audio. Are they separate objects? How do I keep track of them? I need to run through more use cases to build up the functionality.

I spent a lot of time lining up and examining assets that never went anywhere. Much of my game-a-week projects have been scrubbing through my libraries and pulling apart everything that I hadn't touched. I'd say about 40% of the assets that I have ever purchased actually had value. Everything else had minimal or no benefit to any real applications.

What the asset store is useful for is examining the code of others. Most devs that provide source give an insight on different tricks and techniques to get work done. Sometimes it's really bad. And sometimes, I learn something new. 

Hiring someone to develop code is 100x more expensive. I can pay $50 for a reliable asset, or spend 10K on the same solution with another dev along with burning time setting up meetings and sprints. 

What I learned:

*Continuous speculative is not the same as Continuous Dynamic. 

Game making is always messy towards the end. There's no way to get around it. Stability and flexible frameworks don't provide the accuracy for a detailed experience. You just have to write messy software to make detailed experiences. That's a sculptor's skill 

You don't know what you don't know. I learned quite a few hard lessons this week. I'm sad that a lot of my proposed technical solutions didn't work, but I'm glad that I'm moving on.

-CREATEURS SAN FRONTIERES 

"Stay low. Stay humble."

GAME-A-WEEK: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/game-a-week-getting-experienced-at-failure