Plan for Clint S. Brewer

Working with dif Interiors, new UnEarthed Games devdiary, giving in to hidden desires...

I just posted some thoughts on things over at UnEarthed Games. More self motivational than anything. It's easy for me to get caught up in a loop where I feel like I have to research something to death before working on it. I really want to make sure I'm doing the right thing and about 90% of the time, I could have just gotten it done in the first place much more quickly than if I researched what everyone else has done.

This past week I've been working on a dif cavern/mine system for UnEarthed Gods. Creating a set of prefabs I can use to piece together a maze. Making entrances, straight hallways, one to two split hallways, big rooms with things to climb on and other pieces. This is the most work I've done with any of the map making tools, and I really see where the lighting pack comes in now. Trying to do the lighting in the map making tool, moving it into the game, placing dts's around and not having them lit properly is not that fun. I still haven't convinced myself to buy the lighting pack though, I might hack some of my own stuff together. I'm trying to keep the flow of money out of my account a slow as possible. Time is money, but as someone has already said, when you are an indie developer all you have is time!

here's a screenshot of one of the cavern rooms.




Today I am going to give into some of my hidden desires. I have this inward battle that's been going on since I started working with TGE.

It goes something like this:
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self 1: Oh boy, oh boy! I want to make the graphics shinier and prettier and use all of my shader programming knowledge to spiff this engine up.

self 2: Graphics whore!

self 1: But it won't take too long, then I can add some nicer spell effects and the whole game will feel a lot newer

self 2: Graphics whore, you have game play to work on, and game design to work on, and budgets to stick to, and schedules to meet, you still have a long way to go to finish this game. If you want to get nice shaders you can wait until TSE is robust and ready for use. Make do with what you have now, you don't have time to waste on unimportant graphic tom-foolery!

self 1: yes master...as you say master...
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I think that self #2 is smart and has the right ideas, but this week self #1 gets to play with shaders. Yesterday morning I spent a little while getting a cgfx shader manager working with TGE and using a .fx file to render the interiors. It only took a couple hours.

Should be fun, and I'm sure I'll learn some useful things about tge's internals I wouldn't otherwise.