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New project

 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 have the same skeleton used in the character body. It is the best solution, and the code isnt that hard. 

I tested the last one in Unity. The 3d artist produced a player model and an armor set, and everything worked. this time, for Godot, I implemented the code in a couple of hours, two years ago (Godot 4 was not even alpha, I compiled my own copy). Yet, when I told the new artist, the first thing he told me was: "thats impossible, you cant make edges fit, nobody does that, Wasteland 2 doesnt does it that way. The correct way is to put everything on top of player.". After a couple of weeks I managed to convince him that having one skeleton playing animations, and adding 1/2 whatever more skeletons (one per item) and making them follow the same animation was a recipe for disaster (two months later I had to explain him again that it was a big mistake).

The other problem: nobody in the team reads the design docs. Or the script. Technically, I am the design doc and the script. They ask me when they want to know something. 

The bigger problem: we are all volunteers. You think a team of four artists and three programmers is big? Well, I have written 90% of the code. Most of the time, the programmers are busy. Or the game doesnt works and they cant test it and continue working. That wasnt the idea. I am a mediocre programmer, I was supposed to write 10% of the code, design and write. 

Godot 4 is quite incomplete. I have serious issues with navigation and obstacle avoidance, but cant find if it is my fault or engine's fault. We cant use Unity, by the way, or Unreal. 

We have power cuts. The two main artists have a contract with another team and sometimes they work one hour in the project, per week. They think the project is too big.

And despite that, we have achievements! The guys are good (check my twitter and LinkedIn profile for some images of the artists work), they just cant believe they can do this project if they spend more time on it. All the time they complaint that we are not enough. 

Anyway, take a look at our work. We will be releasing videos at some point.

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