Mudtato
A somewhat eventful interim
So the last few months have been anything but uneventful! Fortunately I’ve been kept very busy, and have hardly been impacted at all by the whole covid situation.
I ended up installing Call of Duty Warzone and played it way too much. It’s almost perfection… I’ve always enjoyed CoD, and the game design is masterful - you just want to keep playing.
For Arid, I’ve thought about incorporating some of the concepts of Warzone, and also Metal Gear Acid, of all things. Metal Gear Acid is a turn based strategy… card game? Anyway, it’s great.
However, I’m again struggling with the ethics of creating a game - yet another virtual distraction from the real world.
Ultimately, I still have a lot of work to do and can’t put any time into this at the moment anyway, but I’m still filing away reference art and ideas for designing the world.
Still busy…
It’s still on my mind, and I fit in some reading about WebGL in where I can, but I’m too busy with real work at the moment to do any more than that. So sad.
The original and the best
I recently read Masters of Doom, which I found super inspiring. It’s probably the main reason I decided to commit to this project.
Some time ago I read a story written by Andy Gavin that talked about the process of developing the original Crash Bandicoot game. Ars Technica have just released another episode of their War Stories series featuring Andy who discusses and elaborates on the same story. Again, super inspiring.
All these stories about guys wrestling with the hardware and low level code gives me motivation to persevere with learning the ins and outs of something like WebGL. It’s an order of magnitude simpler than what those guys had to deal with!
Besides, I’m not in a hurry, and the satisfaction I’ll feel at the end will be worth it.
Today’s tangent brought to you by not having time to actually work on anything, again…
Too busy
Unfortunately I’ve been too busy today to make any progress on the game. Tragic.
I’ve been thinking about it, though. The design I’ve had in mind for the game world is mostly, well, arid. Dry, desert wasteland. However, this clashes with my goal of motivating players to explore the world. Jogging over dirt and sand can only stay interesting for so long.
I’m not going to go jamming in lush rainforests or enchanted fairy gardens, but I’m at least going to mix it up a bit with some shrubbery.
WebGL
WebGL is pretty great, but there’s quite a bit to learn. I’ve managed to display an image on a canvas, but it’s not where I want it to be, or even the right size… Definitely not as easy has Html Canvas 2D, and I estimate there will be a lot of learning to do before I can get even a simple prototype done with WebGL. There may even be actual mathematics required. Scary.
Meanwhile, PixiJS has all of the things, and it looks great. I’ll at least give it a decent go myself before I chuck in the towel and use something off the shelf. I think it’s in my best interest to understand how it works.
https://webgl2fundamentals.org/ -> That’s my reading material sorted for the next however many days.
Just doing it
I came across Photopea today. It’s a Photoshop clone that runs in the browser, written in javascript by one person. At first glance it’s a seemingly inhuman feat of engineering, but after looking into it it’s really quite simple, and it’s the same story behind most successes - just start creating something, bit by bit, don’t stop, and eventually there’ll be a result equivalent to the effort put in.
I’m sure if the creator of Photopea had said in the beginning “I’m going to build an almost feature complete clone of Photoshop that runs in the browser and is only 1.5mb of javascript” people might have laughed, or at least thought it’d soon become an abandoned project. Well, to the creator’s credit, he saw it through.
It’s this same attitude that I’ll need to bring to this project, Arid. I have a huge vision, and after putting it off for years because of a lack of confidence technically, and not thinking it’s a worthwhile project (I have a love hate relationship with games…), I’m finally committed.
I did a bit more thinking around death in the game. Perhaps if a player dies within a certain proximity of a settlement they’ll be revived at the nearest settlement. Venturing out into the world alone and far from others would therefore carry a big risk and would encourage preparation and forming a party. A player could be revived by a party member in this case - or they could just have their gear stolen and be left for dead.
I also like the idea of certain creatures destroying or consuming a downed player, preventing them from being revived. While I don’t want the game to punish players, I do want it to be brutal in its consequences for venturing into a hostile wasteland unprepared.