I spend a lot of time starring at the computer screen with the editor open and just sitting there with a blank face. I tend to occupy that time with Netflix on in the background. More often than not, I find myself paying more attention to the movie or the show that’s on than the screen two inches in front of my face.
I remember roughly eight years ago I couldn’t wait to get off work to come home, fire up a movie and hit up the editor and I just recall going to town. The motivation was uncanny. I didn’t have to sit and ponder up/make a decision in regards to the game, I just did it. Where’d that go?
I have so many dreams for Mouse. I catch myself daydreaming about how I view the game in what could be its glory. I can recall the intro and the start of the game before the player has control then it muffles. My vision gets clouded.
Umm… plan? Yea, I’ve got one… kind of.
Right now, my thoughts are this. I’m going to make my hybrid of the two ideas I’ve been fighting with this past while. I’m going to make a “generic” type game that excludes Mouse’s key story/game-play thoughts that make that unique.
Here’s my reasoning. I’m going to make this game as much as I can, with the spare/scrap ideas I’ve had before, and with that hope I can concrete the main points/game-play for mouse by this sort of, trial & error. Who knows, sometimes this is how beauty is found. We’ll see.
I had a bit of a panic attack the last few weeks. I’ve been working on Canasta, implementing the AI, thinking I’ve had the first set of logic completed, ran the test and then I saw a nasty error message.
I left the project for a couple weeks. I was pretty frustrated. I kept running the code through my mind trying to find the problem and figure out what was causing the leak. Then BOOM! I found it. I use an animate handler that was getting overflowed with information. So in turn I created a animate Query handler to hold the next animate object before it needs to be processed. Thus cutting all the information required to be held at any given time to nearly nothing.
I’ve worked out the kinks the last couple days and now I’m good to hit the next step in the AI, hand control and going into their foot. Bring on the logical nightmares!
In other bloated news, I’ve been slowly documenting odd ideas and pieces of information for Mouse, but in all honesty, I’m not sure where to start. I have this great big vast idea for this game, but not sure how to present it. I have two main dilemmas, first being the perspective, I can’t decide if it going to be a side scroller (think Zelda 2 and Castle Crashers), or do I want to do a more traditional style (Zelda LTTP, FF series). The second dilemma, enemies and user drive. In one way I want to have a world of puzzles and misconception, then in the opposite direction, I want the world to play out like Diablo/Guild Wars type of world. The best, ultimately, would be a good mix of both ideas.