A Writer's journey into game development

 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 ...