A Writer's journey into game development

 Meet Bobby (not Kotick)! He is going to taught you a lesson about how NOT to make games. Bobby is a very sharp bussinessman, that sees everybody is playing games. More important, everybody is spending money in games. What would any smart bussinessman do? Well, get into the games bussiness, and he knows he has an advantage. See, Bobby is not going to spend hundredths of thousands dollars to make a game, when he can make it much cheaper.  And here comes the first mistake. Bobby goes to his birth city, in a shitty third class communist country, where it is easier to find a honest politician than a game developer. There, he assembles the Avengers... I mean, a team of talented guys that... never made a game in their lives. He invests in hardware, with good workstations equipped with fairly modern GPUs, pairde with the worst, cheapest 18 inches display you can get. Also, a server with a 24 VRAM GPU, because any game studio needs a server for... nobody knows exactly for what, but t...

 Well, what I mean is that we entered a second test phase, this time with a few more people. And yes, I have been away for much longer now, but Cuba is a total disaster right now and every minute with electricity has to be spent on something that counts. Currently, the plan is to polish current prototype and see what happens. I really have no hopes that with current look it will be accepted by a publisher, but I have no budget for a whole overhaul of art. I am thinking to use itch.io and try to get some donations, so, stay tuned if you are interested in helping a game developer in a shitty country.

 

Good news! And bad news.Project is coming up nicely, with a small private demo released to some friends. Got great insight from it, and even fixed some issues. Big problem is that some other issues depend on a full team, or at least, on some artists working regularly.  The game requires a total rework of the art. That's inevitable. We took some bad decisions to speed up work that has proven to be a burden in advanced stages. For example: using MakeHuman to generate characters. Per se, it is not that bad, if you take some time to retouch the result. Also, animators hate MH's rig. Don't use it. I had an excellent animator, and the game anims are bad. Not totally his fault, he had to work with a subpar rig that limited what he could do.  Also, another advice. Godot really sucks with kitbashes. Now we have a nice kitbash that allows me to create all sort of fancy buildings, even with interiors, but the game suffered a severe perfomance penalty. Godot can't properly instance...

 O3DE is no longer the newcomer. From "why do we need another engine if we have Unreal, Unity and Godot?" we went to "Maybe I should consider this as a valid candidate". Version 24.09 offers a certain level of maturity, enough to make it worth the risk of trying it. In fact, there are people already working in serious projects, like Carbonated Inc. which is using it for a multiplayer mobile game. So, I am spending more time with O3DE. It is something completely different and requires more effort than other engines, specially because I have other projects to take care, and also because I have to learn Unreal at same time (it is one of my jobs now). But, despite lack of documentation and tutorials, I have advanced a bit, mostly thanks to the help of the community. Lets see what can I do with it in the future.  

 

 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 ...

 

 We have finished the project and it is time tostart a new one. This time, I have convinced the team to work on a combat  prototype and try Godot 4. After a month, Im quite pleased with the progress. Specially, we have applied animation retargeting, which is a new feature in Godot 4. In previous project, our main artist devised a clever way to reuse animations, but now we have a native solution. Our first attemp didnt worked, but I found that remapping the armature starting by the feet solved the problem. Weird, isnt it? By the way, you can see the prototype here . WE are keeping it public to let people learn from our mistakes. And, if you need some animation retargeting tutorial, this is the guide we used:

This has been a quite complicated video to make. During process my PC died, a couple of weeks later I had to continue in another PC, and then edited in my new PC. The result: a total mess. But at least you can see how does O3DE works. Do not consider this as a tutorial! It is just a test I made to learn the engine.

After a long wait they are here! Check the official Youtube Channel .I was preparing a little video about the engine, but my board died.

 Yesterday at last I could bring my PC to the work and install O3DE, a long pending task. I have to say Im quite happy with that. Maybe it is a trivial task for you, but for me it required finding something to carry the PC  to a place with internet (and save the hours), dodge the power cuts, and sort a lot of difficulties. When I finished, the editor crashed opening the test project. Im fucked! was my first thought. Then, my mouse broke, and I knew I was definitely and totally fucked.  But at home I found that O3DE idoes work! I started playing with it, but you know, it lacks documentation even for the most basic tasks. Amazon should take a look at that. I cant imagine an engine that doesnt documents how to program a game with its scripting language, only with visual scripting. Im sure New World wasnt made only with visual scripting. And no, my mouse didnt work. I dont know how many hours can I spend with this engine, but Iw ill try to bring my experiences to you in a cou...

 

 The first of a serie of videos about mistakes made during development (in spanish).  Remember that now you can support me on Patreon !

 It has been a long time since my last post. I have no time to write, specially not in english, and to make things worse, I found some sort of bug in Blogger. But you are reading this to know about my successful career as game developer, not to hear me complain about bugs. In 2021 I released my first game. It was a remake of an old cuban game: The Labyrinth of Knowledge. You can get it free on itch.io , but I would appreciate if you leave a tip for a new keyboard and mouse. The future looked bright: there were changes and finally we could create software startups, including the ones dedicated exclusively to games. Two of those startups released successful titles for Android and made money of it. The first dev group, ConWiro, developed a payment gateway that used SMS, but was the second studio, Nameless, who made much more profit of it, with the first cuban made multiplayer game. Even the government showed some interest in pushing game development. In march of this year I got my pap...

 Well, shit happens. My motherboard died a week ago, leaving me in the middle of two projects. Never again will buy Gigabyte, the plans are to get an MSI Tomahawk or some ASUS, probably with a Ryzen 3600. But... I have to wait a couple of months. Or more. Travels from USA to Cuba are rather limited now. Also, I still have to save part of the money. I had plans to add a few things to Labyrinth of Knowledge and release a PC port, but the few thing end up requiring a refactoring. There is a little bug pending, and then I will release a first version in itch.io or something.

  Started in 2015. Came back to life in 2018 and was abandoned again in the beginning of 2019. One and a half year later, resurrected with latest Unity.