Accomplished (11/5, 11/7)
- * Figured out and/or implemented a temp fix for the jitter issues
- * Solved the first-person movement bug (THANK YOU Joe Osborn)
- * Double-checked that all goals for characters 1 and 2 can be completed
- * Started on the implementation of movement for character 3
- * Worked for one evening on a Hackathon game to clear my mind and restore sanity
Next Steps
- * Complete movement code for character 3
- * Write AI for character 3 NPCs
- * Double-check whether jitter issue is permanently or temporarily fixed
- * Make it so that fleeing characters don’t have to go all the way to their checkpoint before leaving the territory
- * Find out if I can get my sound designer access to the cinema school sound effects library
The thing about game design is, you can’t do it alone. You might really want to, but eventually you’re going to find yourself up against a task that you just can’t do by yourself. So far this semester I’ve been trying to basically do everything I can on “Explore” by myself. But there are tasks I just don’t have the skills for.
I would say the most commonly-demanded tasks that designers just can’t do themselves are art and/or music. (With animation as a sub-category of art.) I personally can do just enough 2D art to get by for simple stuff, but for a professional-level game I’d want to get someone who actually knew what they were doing. I also know a bit of programming, but I’m no professional engineer and sometimes that really hurts.
Case in point. Despite not being a great programmer, I’ve so far been programming the whole game myself in Unity. A few weeks ago I ran into a bug in my code that was stopping me from moving properly as one of the characters, and essentially making the game unplayable. I had NO idea where this bug was coming from. I didn’t even know how to start looking for it. Finally, at my wits’ end, I sought the help of a friend who knows Unity better than I do.
Joe Osborn literally fixed that bug and probably several others in my code simply by typing “Fixed” into the script in question. The error had been that I was using an “Update” loop where I should have been using “FixedUpdate.” The thing is, I had no idea what FixedUpdate really was, or what its purpose was, and when to use one function over the other. I would never have caught that bug on my own. It really just boiled down to needing the help of someone who knew what they were doing.
The thing about being a designer is that you have all these dependencies because it’s nearly impossible for one person to excel at all the fields necessary for creating a game (even if you might have some basic competence in most or even all of those areas), at least enough to make the game feel polished. But as designers, we really don’t WANT to have to rely on others. When you have a strong vision for a game, you’d like to be able to hand-craft every aspect of the game to make it exactly the experience you’re looking to create. The fact that you have to cede some of this power and responsibility to others can be maddening – at least for me it is.
And yet Joe fixed in about an hour a problem that had troubled me for weeks. A good artist can make the difference between a game looking professional and looking amateur. A good musician can give a game mood and tone in a way no one else can. To actually realize the game in your head, you have to cooperate with a number of other people who have the skills to push in those categories, to really make each and every aspect of your game shine like you want it to. A designer role therefore ends up being as much about knowing how to deal with others – how and when to get help, and how to communicate what you need – as it does about actually designing the experience in the first place.