Friday, April 8, 2011

I think it's time for a break.



For the last few days I've been extremely stressed with my second game project, almost to the point where it's not any fun anymore. I mean seriously, I've been up until 3-4 AM with rolling headaches working on this and lacking a good amount of sleep. (3-4 hours a day average!) Call it obsessive-compulsive, but i am trying to get minor details right and just fixing one thing takes me hours if it's not perfectly centered or does not perform what I want it to do.

On Saturday, I'm going to teach one (maybe two) of my friends the program and the ins and outs of how it works. I'm hoping with a few others doing some of the event work (which doesn't require programming knowledge), I can go more into the "nitty-gritty" and program some features in Ruby that I would like to appear in game that events cannot really do.

Earlier, I kind of got put on blast for only using a simple "beginner's" tool to do this project, but I'm well aware of my team's abilities. We all have ambition, but no experience. I'm barely learning Unity and Unreal myself, to teach others how to use these advanced tools will be too much work, especially if we're trying to tell a whole story. The amount of things to model, the amount of areas to build, and the team required to do all of that will take way too long to be remotely reasonable.

With RPG Maker VX, I can easily teach the team how to use a program I've practiced with for almost 10 years now and we can have a pretty good game with their event knowledge and my programming skills in coming up with an interesting battle system (which is my goal for this year.)

I just want to note that this game project does have an emphasis on story and game-play elements rather than the actual graphics. Personally, I'm not too picky on the graphics. However, I am aware a consistent art style does help - If a game doesn't at least look visually appealing, then no one will play it no matter how good the story is or how well it plays. So there's a long road of development ahead of us.

Like I said, I really can't reveal any huge details about the project (are there any?), and there is an overwhelming amount of ideas and things are being worked on.

I'm hoping once these stress headaches clear up a bit, I can actually focus on working on drawing an overworld map, we will see.

Until Sunday!




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