Time Extended

No posts because last week contained the date of my birth. I think it can be discovered over in my little bio, and maybe not. Plan was to work through most of my week of festivities, but instead I decided to do other things, and I feel almost bad about it. Now I’m over it and have gotten back to working.
On a basic level I’ve been continuing to build and debug the front menu. The previous idea of nesting the engine inside the nice, warm interior of a menu loop, like the way a mommy bird would protect her code, worked out great. Not the exits quit back to the front and a proper game closing can happen. Still parts to polish, still parts to build – like the Fencing Tutorial, but I’m getting happier with the system the more time I spend with it.
I got the page flippy working on all levels now. So it works on all the page flips in the menu (which looks pretty cool – I’d post a movie if I could figure out how) and I can toggle it on or off for the engine itself. So I can have page flips happen in the game if I feel like it. Mostly at the end of chapters or when I want to summon up a scene. Currently, the Basic Tutorial uses it to great effect, since that Tutorial exists in a kind of other world outside the contexts of the game proper. It’s the kind of idea that I could do something with, but now the whole system of the thing is far too past the point where whim can make an impact on the shape.
I find that I can’t figure out the layout of the Fencing Tutorial, and how it would fit all together. Everything comes back to a fighting game character select screen and nothing quite seems to match the aesthetic that I’ve carefully constructed on the front. Add to that the incomplete animation sets and even if the coding were done and set up with placeholders, then it still wouldn’t really function. I consequently find myself not wanting to start something I won’t be able to finish for a while. There are other things over there => that are still black I’ll work on instead. Like GamePad Support, finishing off the difficulty setting modes, a function for showing story mode pieces and those Walls aren’t going to build themselves. Still much to do.

– I was thinking about our little project, and a simple thought came to me. None of us have done any of this before. We’ve got a programmer that’s never coded, an artist that’s never drawn game backgrounds, an animator that’s never done sprites and a musician that’s never written game music. We are a motley crew indeed.
But that’s not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. It frees us to do anything and make our own mistakes and learn our own lessons. I’ve found that, once you’ve done something before, you have a frame of reference, a place to start for all subsequent similar situations. This invariably leads to having your choices shaped by those experiences. Given an option, a person will try to go with what has worked for them in the past.
We don’t have that, those past experiences. It’s all new, all fresh and all slightly more difficult than it would be otherwise. But everything, every aspect, every system every methodology will be distinctly ours. Without experience that says something can’t be done, we can try and maybe find a way with a new perspective and using raw talent. I like that. I think it can only ever lead to great things.

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