Scrapped: Custom Pony Avatars

     A big part of making feasible games (ones you intend to finish) is cutting features to limit the scope of your game. During Unicorn Quest's development a lot of things hit the cutting room floor. One of my first ideas to go was the customizable hero. I tried thinking of ways to make it work but in the end it just required too much work and too much game memory.

The First Background is Complete!

     Pushed by the urge to make something that will motivate me, I finished up the background for the forest battle room and changed Clover into fight mode. Now I can watch her in what is basically what I want the final game to look like. Adding details after all that really made it feel complete and I couldn't be more excited to work on this game.

     Having the trees with varying hues succeeded in giving the forest level some color, and I want the whole game to be colorful and visually distinct. I added a bunch of grass sprites scattered across the checkered pattern to make the forest floor seem more messy and less uniform. When everything was in place something still looked wrong until I added a shadow beneath Clover. Now the world feels real. The 3D feel is much more immersive and helps you better judge your collision box.

     And if you're wondering about the bar and text over Clover's head, I'm working on things to put over living game objects and I'll explain each thing once they're working better. I'm starting to think that may be the better approach to take from this stage on. Small things can be shown when they're ready and big things are worth posting about ahead of time.

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?