Typing is hard when you’re a puddle of goo on the floor, but such is life as temperatures reach lofty heights here at the #EgoOffice. So while I still have the capacity to type, lets dive into last week!
I’m going to level with you guys. I didn’t get any Horde work done last Friday. I spent the morning working on finishing touches for the art and writing the blog, and basically took the afternoon off. Not intentionally. I had the program open, I knew what I wanted to achieve. But it never came. By 4:30 I had to give it up as a bad job. I’ll try to do better this week, so y’all can see something new and interesting! Also so I can further my long term goal of releasing our first original IP, a stepping stone to building a successful games company, and surviving in the world of business, but mostly it’s the “giving you something nice to look at” thing.
My goal last week, and now this week, was/is to get the new artwork into the game. Now, this sounds simple enough. Just drag the image onto the card’s image spot, right? Well, not quite. I am programmatically generating the cards, and each card face can be represented by different images, based on what you have unlocked and selected. The latter code does not exist yet, and I’m still trying to work out the best way of doing it. Let’s break this down a bit:
As you can see from this hastily knocked together diagram, different types of zombie will have variants, skins if you like, that add visual differences to the zombie, while keeping the type the same. This makes the game more interesting to look at, without over complicating things by having hundreds of zombies with different stats. I want the picture to either: Always be the same, regardless of the variant you are about to spawn, pick one unlocked variant each time you start a level to represent that grouping, or change each time you spawn a zombie to show the variant you’re going to spawn ahead of time. And I still haven’t decided which path to go down. Two out of the three involve keeping a bank of every unlocked variant handy at all times. I suspect building that will be most of my day!
In SockMonkey news, it took a week of my life, but the Xbox One Native build now compiles and successfully deploys to console. It seems to be mostly functional, with only save code needed to get it to where the Switch is, I reckon. Now, you may be wondering, how on Earth did it take so long to get it to simply compile, and the answer is… I don’t want to talk about it. Do you remember weeks ago me mentioning that Xbox was always the console that gave me trouble? Well, nothing has changed. Let’s move on before I weep!
To celebrate being able to see some friends again, the #EgoHousehold went for a jaunt to the Peak District last weekend! We met up with some people, and wandered over Mam Tor. We did keep socially distant, but it was very nice to see them in the flesh again. Some people don’t seem to distinguish between video chat and in-person, but to me the difference is night and day! It did turn out that everyone in a 10-mile radius had also travelled to these beloved hills, but we were careful and managed to avoid mingling!
Right, the promised rains hit halfway through this, so the temperature has cooled to the point where I can think again. Better make use of it!
Matt out.
I don’t think the title of your article matches the content lol. Just kidding, mainly because I had some doubts after reading the article.
Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?
Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?