Oof. It’s been a rough few weeks. I’m not dead though! Just stressed and tired. Sorry for the lack of updates but I really haven’t been feeling up to writing lately. Not only am I still dealing with water damage repairs, not only am I still without a washing machine, but the past few weeks have been very stressful for a number of other reasons.
That’s enough complaining though, here’s what I’ve been up to the past few weeks.
Momentum
Up until now I had just kinda figured that people would probably be more interested in following my work if I worked on one project consistently, rather than jumping to something new every week. I realized I didn’t actually know this, so I ran a poll on Mastodon and Twitter, asking which development style they’d prefer. The votes came back 10 to 3 in favor of doing whatever I feel like working on as long as there’s something shiny to see, even if any given project may end up neglected for a while. As it turns out, strangers on the internet that want to give you money to do what you love actually want you to do what you love. Who’d have thought?
Adventure Game
The desire to ask this question didn’t come out of nowhere though. I had been burning out on the adventure game, and pushing myself to work on it anyway didn’t find much success. Combined with the stress of trying to provide regular updates on one project consistently, it was getting harder and harder to work on it at all, and I found myself working on just about anything else.
To anyone who was excited about the adventure game, it’s not gone forever, I’ll just be focusing on other projects for now. (The desire to make a game like that has been in my head for years, and I don’t see it going away any time soon) I believe working on what I’m motivated to do will result in more stuff getting done, and more frequent updates, even if they’re not all for the same project.
Speaking of other projects,
MMOFPS
I mentioned in my last post that I’d started working on a federated MMOFPS. (This the main thing I was getting distracted by) Since then I’ve made good progress, and also made some design changes, like making the game third-person only. Originally I wanted it to be switchable between first- and third-person, but not only was that a lot more work, it was also limiting in terms of the gameplay I could create. I’m in love with the frantic, speedy action of Warframe, and that just wouldn’t be feasible in first-person. So I guess it’s not really an MMOFPS anymore, more of a…. MMOTPS. Then again it’s not much of an MMO anyway. It’s modeled after Destiny and Warframe which are Massively Multiplayer and Online, but have small individual instances with few players.
Enough rambling. Here’s what things look like as of today:
The animations are a little sloppy (and some straight up missing like strafing and jumping), and the enemies are just cubes, but overall I’m pretty happy with this progress. It’s running off of a dedicated server too! It runs mostly the same with multiple players although a few things aren’t replicated properly yet, and I’m not doing any server-side verification just yet. Regardless, I’ve been making a ton of progress and I’m excited to do more.
If you read this far, thank you for your interest. If you’ve been waiting for updates, I apologize, and thank you for your patience. I’ll try to post updates on Mastodon a lot more frequently from now on, even if it’s a different thing each day.
See you soon!