A Writer's journey into game development

 Well, considering most of the team is working only a few hours every week, we are not too behind schedule, but I don't foresee we can release a demo for november. Some time has been spent trying to find a workflow that help an small and unexperienced team to produce a sizeable amount of complex assets. We are still experimenting, but a few things are already in place. Ok, lets see what have we done.  After several tests, we have defined player models structure. We are using a body separated in six parts: head, torso, arms, hands, legs and feet. To save time, the character is generated via MakeHuman. The pro is that you get a complete and anatomically correct model in minutes. The cons, you have to work a bit to lower the poly count, because MakeHuman offers a high poly model and a very low poly one that looks ugly. Also, all the models looks pretty much the same (you will notice that in the character creation scene), but as we use an isometric camera, during gameplay the raci...

 A bit late, but here is it!  

 Took some time, but at last I managed to install O3De 23.05. I have no time to extensively test it, because there is a project requiring all my effort, but I took a couple of nights to work with it. I cant find any dramatic changes, this is not a big leap like 22.10 was. Im not sure if we will see another release like that again. Im not going to get into a proper analysis (a few hours are not enough), but here are some things that O3DE needs to improve: Project creation process now involves a build, that requires Visual Studio. That is annoying for artists. Project build is complex. And I mean complex. It takes 12 steps, and manually copying stuff. Lucky us, it is being fixed and I hope we will have the new building script in next major release. Animation workflow is annoying. As  a developer currently working in a project that requires several animations and retargeting, I dont see feasible switching to a workflow that produces separate files for each animation. By the way, ...

 Time to talk about new project! We started about seven months ago, right after finishing (or abandoning) a combat prototype. It is a single player, 3d, isometric RPG, nothing original or innovative. Quite a big task, and I will explain why right now. First of all, we are not veterans. Many of the solutions which might be obvious to some experienced developer are not so for us. For example, I asked several times how to implement equiping items in player: clothes, armors, etc. As far as I remember, the solutions are a few: 1- The WoW solution: armors are a texture, you simply change the material in the body part. You can add extra decorations by attaching geometries. Everybody wants to do this, specially the artists. 2- The simple solution: you put the armor, or whatever, on top of charatcer, attaching it to a bone, or something. Useless for animated things like leggins or gloves. 3- The replacement solution: you switch the body part by the piece of equipment. The equiped part must ...

Saturday: bus from Havana is late, so I arrive home at 10 AM instead of 8 AM. A minute after opening the door, lights goes off. In the end, I can only work 2-3 hours in the game, instead of the whole day as I expected. Sunday: a day for resting. More exactly, an afternoon for the only nap in the week, morning is for my daughter. Also, it is super bowl night, so no work. Monday: day work, and work in the game during night. Tuesday: some weird fire in a sugar cain filed produces an space-time singul;arity that leaves half of the country without electricity during 6 hours. My half, of course. Wednesday:  day work, and work in the game during night. Thursday: a day of work is too much. When I come home, power cut for an hour. When power is back, cell phone network is down. Friday:  day work, and work in the game during night. Saturday: A human error causes a massive failure in the electrical network, 90% of the country without power. Of course, my 90%. Blackout lasts until 8 PM, s...