Unimpressive Interesting Game Dev

And what we all have to go through during the early stages of production

The beginnings of a project can sometimes be very unimpressive and very uninteresting.

Why is that?

The answer is… because most of it is unimpressive and uninteresting. And no one really wants to see or hear about that! At this stage… there’s no flashy final boss, no funny video clips, no gameplay in fact. There’s just a whole lot of logistics, setup, version control, naming convention, planning, setting up trello boards, getting organized, migrating stuff, making tools and front end necessities that doesn’t get shared often.

That’s where we’re at this week… and I’m going to highlight some of those things because one… I do find it really interesting with some of these QoL updates to games, and two… I don’t know what else to write about. But if this all sounds uninteresting and unimpressive, feel free to wait for the highly anticipated 5s viral animated gif on tiktok coming soon… in a few years :)

Tools

• Foliage Material ID - Our (previously mentioned) way of handling color variation through a palette map. This tool provides batch-randomized system for applying material color IDs to all of our 2D sprite foliage assets

• Replace Game Objects - Surprisingly Unity doesn’t have a “swap” button built into the inspector, so replacing things that you’ve already placed into the level isn’t as easy as a button click… until now! It does what it does… replaces everything you’ve selected with the new Gameobject you specified while keeping their exact position, rotation, and scale.

  

Selection Highlighting

Using the mouse the player can highlight which foliage objects we’ll be able to destroy, clean-up, carry, uproot… it’ll be one of those things… or all of those things. We should probably figure that out soon.

Foliage Displacement

Not necessarily important or needed at this stage of production … but also if you’re an artist… totally necessary and needed at this stage of production. I’ll justify the too much time I spent on this. For now, it’s a fun thing to do and game dev is suppose to be fun right?

Camera Switching

Determining the final camera angle and position on the other hand is probably a more serious, important thing we need to decide on. This will determine the POV and what we’ll want to show off… and ultimately will determine how assets are created.

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs…

Bugs are definitely the unappreciated work of game dev. They’re already coming in the moment you start making stuff. Many are uninteresting, but every once in awhile there are a few that are impressive… and in this case… somewhat funny.

So I leave you on that clip. Mostly all unimpressive things. There’s always going to be so many things to do, problems to solve, things to make, and bugs to fix. It’s all part of what makes game dev so interesting to me.

Now that most of these things are in, we have a good foundation to start running our core cleanup mechanic. I’m sure you noticed the sweet broken window in the gray building there… its just asking to be repaired and restored don’t you think?

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