Zooming, Battle Rooms, and Map Plans

     The scenes need to be small enough to load quickly and not lag during gameplay. They also need to be big enough to explore and fit interesting content. A nice trick to making a place feel bigger is to zoom in on the avatar, limiting your view and even feeling a bit claustrophobic indoors. I can use this trick for some parts of the game but for others, it's important that players can see far.

     Particularly in battles. This game plays like a shooter so you need to see where projectiles are going and where they're coming from. There will also be puzzles where a larger field of view will be necessary, so I coded the game to adjust the camera and HUD as the zoom changes dynamically. It's a useful rick I'll be putting to use in fun ways once I have some maps planned out.

See what I have in mind below the break.

The Unecessary College Degree

     I've been having reoccurring daydreams lately. Daydreams about what I wished college was like. I'm basically venting my anger about why college degrees are worthless for some career choices, but are still required. When Google is the greatest learning tool on Earth, and it's available for free, why is college still mandatory? I can only speak for the gaming industry on this but I'm sure it applies in similar fields. People can easily and very effectively teach each other. Practice, internships, and apprenticeships are quite a bit more useful than standardized tests.

     I can see the day were the collaborative effort of teaching through the internet makes formal schooling for some fields obsolete and it can't get here soon enough. It's awful that degrees are this multi-thousand dollar piece of paper that serves as a required check-mark on resumes for jobs that should be performed by people with the most ability. Who cares where you learned to do a job as long you can do it right?

Status Report #28

     Unicorn Quest is coming along nicely. It's starting to look like an actual game now. Every day I go to bed with a sense of accomplishment because I know I'm getting stuff done. I want to have something to showcase the combat in action by the end of spring break (where I'll have a solid 10 days of development). This way of development is much better than how I did things before. Switching hats frequently instead of dedicating to one task is a lot less stressful and I get to see the game quickly coming to life.

     Take a look at what got done in this week's status report.

Making Maps With Tiles

     Unicorn Quest is gong to need maps. Lots of them. She's going to be running around fighting monsters, stepping on switches and talking to townsfolk and there needs to be a background for her to stand on. The problem is I have never made a game like this before and I need a place to start. That's why I'm trying out something new. I'm going to make color coded mock-ups in MS Paint to chart out where all the tiles will be in a room, then placing tileset pieces I make around the map.