A Writer's journey into game development

I don't know how I did it, but while I was migrating my previous third person camera controller to free look (like The Witcher or Mass Effect, the previous one was like Dragon Age), I totally broke it. As I always say: if you want to be a programmer, you must be ready at any time to discard your code and start over again, so I went back to an old prototype that works as intended and got that code. It doesn't supports Xbox controller, but it is easy to add it. Fortunately, I still had that old prototype. I think I wanted to delete it some months ago, but I decided to save it as reference, and this is a very important lesson: don't throw away anything (code or assets), unless you are 100% sure you have a better solution for that very problem. In my case, I thought I would be using a Dragon Age like camera, but I kept that code in case I had to deal with another project. Why I am changing to free look camera mode? Because it is better suited for controllers. Actually, I h...

At last I finished this game. The narrative wasn't too good in the beginning, but gets a bit better later. Anyway, it is compensated by the corrosive humor, which gets better and better towards the end of the game. I laughed a lot, I admit it. I couldn't finish the first game, but I think this second one has some improvements over the original gameplay mechanics, specially in battles. I disagree with some design decisions, like the suits being useless, except for cosmetic purposes. I expected the clothes to provide some bonus, but they didn't, so I totally forgot about them. So, it is a good game, and I hope we have another South Park soon. Maybe in the E3 this year?

A bit late I knew that Godot team has decided to abandon OpenGL 3 in favor of Vulkan. Read the whole details in the official post . Not going to do an in depth analysis of this. They previously  avoided OpenGL 4, Vulkan and DirectX 12, arguing several reasons, now the offer different reasons why they should change to Vulkan, discard OpenGL 3 and GL ES 3, and go back to GL ES 2. Anyway, the switch is welcome, I am sure it will bring improvements to the 3d rendering quality (which was getting better lately). If I weren't so used to Unity I would be seriously thinking moving to Godot. Keep an eye on it!

After reading most of the Sanderson books, I had this saga in the pending list. I hate reading in english and it is far from finished, which means there will be long wait periods between the publishing date of the books and its availability in spanish. Not gonna make a full review here, there are many out there and Sanderson doesn't needs it. If he would publish a book and tell no one, probably he would sell millions anyway. I just have to say that I sense something different here, it is more like reading Malazan Book of the Fallen stories: in the beginning you have no idea about what's going on. What the book doesn't lacks is the exuberant Sanderson's fantasy. The world is unique and very different, with all sorts of creatures and even some human tribes or races have bizarre features. Yet, it is not totally alien to the reader and you can easily assimilate the weird stuff. Definitely, China Miéville could learn a thing or two from these books. And so do I.

This week at last I received the new video card: an XFX Radeon RX 560. I actually wanted an MSI, the OC model, but my friend decided to buy elsewhere. I have to say that the card really scared me, it's auto load sensing system halts the fan when the load/temperature is low. Son, when I installed the official driver, the fan stopped. Had to ask a lot and try in other PC to notice that it was the intended behavior. The perfomance is not exceptional, of course, I was aware of that before testing it. The 560 is not a high end card, and it's 4Gb memory is a bit more than it really needs. All I can do now I couldn't with my old R7 250 is that I can play at full HD resolution with quality settings at medium or high, depending on the game, and reach 40 FPS. The good news is that also I will upgrade CPU, motherboard and RAM, but still, will keep some money for a future card. My plans are to replace the 560 in a year or so with something much better. Also,  a friend of mine fi...

A quick post to share with you this excellent article about optimizing your Unity game . Some of the advices are simple and obvious, others are more advanced. I confess I started to read the article and thought: "nothing useful, more of the same", but a few lines later I had changed my mind.