Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Bite the bullet in more then one way.

   Well I have been fighting eye strain for the past while, as I posted in my last update. Today I decided to bite the bullet and start up work again on the game. So I worked for about an hour on the game and find two problems, the first being what I knew already. My eyes became sore, irritated, and difficult to focus. OK so that puts me KO for games work today. After realizing that the pain behind my eyes had turned into a full blown migraine, I took two Bufferin (Japanese equivalent of Aspirin). Still got my migraine, but it has been kind to me while I type this.
   My second problem came while I was working on the game. So before I tell you what the problem is I will tell you a little story.
   Back in August when I first starting thinking of building games, with the new found knowledge that I had learned, I stumbled upon the IGF contest and thought "hey I want to try and enter that" so I asked my wife if it would be OK to work night and day on an entry. She said that would be OK. So from the last week of August till October 17th I worked night and day to produce a demo for my entry. During that time I was struggling with the games concepts and mechanics, it was a huge undertaking. I AM BUT ONE MAN, scaling a mountain.
   During production I ran into several problems and coding issues. Sometimes things never worked right and sometimes things got broken when new things were added. Well due to the deadline and my fear that I would never be able to make the cut off date, I cut corners, bypassed code, and cut out important features of the game that would be beneficial now.
   Fast forward back to today, when running some tests and organizing the new content for the game. Those overlooked and bypassed part of the games code have come back to bite me in the ass. After figuring that I need to fix them, and then trying to fix them. Have determined that in my hast to produce the games demo, and bypassing too many things, if I fix those problems, I will create a domino effect with several other systems.
   I have foolishly integrated the problems into the games so much so, that if I fix them it will break the game. The only way to fix this problem without having to spend hours upon hours of code hunting for the new problems. I have decided to do a clean build of the open world elements of the game. (These being the only parts that were having issues during production) I will rewrite all the code for these parts and then integrate the platforming elements and stitch them in so that everything works perfectly. If all goes well I should have access the features and elements that I damaged back in early production, such as controller controls for the game. This just keeps getting better and better.

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