It's been a tough week, hard to get into it this week for various reasons. I finally got the momentum going again last night, but technically that was Thursday, so really a very poor return this week:
- Got a training area. I plan to make the AI work itself out here. So rather than mess with the main scene I created a trainign scene, and plan to build a whole lot of scenarios into this scene. It will be sort of like an AI unit test, although I'll have to visualise the results, but it's just too difficult to do other ways. The plan is to make changes to AI, then run this in as many scenarios as I can, and watch the AI do it's thing.
- Cleaned up some code. Creating a new scene showed me there too many weird dependencies in my classes. I couldn't add AI to a player, without having to add this to the scene, with then needed the manager, etc, etc. I have cleaned it up a little, though for the most part I just added the components, I need to move on. Also, as I work more in the AI classes, I plan to clean up the code somewhat. The structure isn't too bad yet, but evertime I come to an AI class I haven't seen for 10+ days, it takes me 10 minutes to work through the decisions. I think In future projects, I may end up adding a tonne more AI classes, specific to different ideas, with descriptive class names.
But to be honest, I didn't get any real traction on any real work. I'm hitting a bit of a wall when it comes to drive on this project. I guess I came in thinking, that if someone who likes Aussie Rules games hears about this, I will get a lot of support, that might grow and grow by launch. But there are many factors playing against me. Firstly, I have never actually written a game. Love sports games and complain about them as I do, this doesn't make me any more of an expert then 50m other sports gamers. This really reduces peoples care factor about what I'm doing, because they (maybe rightfully) don't think I can do anything good at this stage. I think another factor is the limited scope I'm aiming at. It's a catch 22, because I don't think I could have finished a project if I was aiming at a fully blown console version. But then nobody really wants a cut down version. Then I guess it's just a bit disallusioning looking more into the future of what is indie dev for me. If I can't even gather any interest in a specific sport with a huge lack of games in that area, then what chance do I have competing in bigger markets as a sole developer?
Well, last night I got some decent stuff going, so I'm back on focus again now. I figure I'll do this until end of November, try to deploy as a beta to android, perhaps even IOS, and re-assess. But there is no point putting in a half assed final 6 weeks, and looking back and saying I couldn't get any support. At this stage my final hope for getting some support is to really work hard at making a decent fun game, and hope those that do step up to have a go like it and spread the word. So this week I should be:
- Working on unit testing. That is boring code talk, but it essentially means my AI will have a set of conditions it needs to pass. I did half of this Thursday, when I set out the conditions for when and how a player should get to a contest, but technically that's next week.
- Work on getting to a contest AI. There is a lot of AI to think about still, my first target is to get players to intuitively get to a contest, thinking about other players, the ball etc.
- If I still have time, it's then collisions. The biggest difficulty is going to be making a non-repetetive way for players to collide, be it the bump before the contest, a player flying in from the side, 3-4 players all going for the jump at once. I have some ideas, though the code for this one will be interesting to say the least. My ideal is that my unit test scenarios will produce not only somewhat realistic contests, but also not the exact same contest each time. Like occasionally one of the 4 players should jump too early, because they are nervous about the upcoming contact from up to 3 players. Yet other times they should nail the jump, and perhaps even take the mark. But it is important to keep it simple first, so something there will likely give.
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