I've been developing a game in AS3 for a year or so now. It's a 2d platformer that uses raster graphics, although it also uses Flash's 2d drawing routines for UI stuff, which should hypothetically make it a bit more portable. I have most of the foundational components of the game in place, but I'm seriously starting to question if I want to finish the project, which still has a substantial ways left to go (probably at least a year), in Flash.

The impetus for this is that, having just discovered Pixel Bender, I found out immediately after that Adobe gimped its functionality in Flash, making it run in the virtual machine and slowing it by a factor of 5+. I was briefly really excited by the idea of a shader language that wouldn't force me to work with AS3's monstrously awful 3d API, but apparently it was not to be. Between this, the ongoing absence of controller support, and Adobe's recent sprint of questionable business ethics, I'm not feeling too comfortable about using this tool any more.

Which is a real goddamn shame, because FlashDevelop is fucking awesome.

So, here's my question: Where should I go from here? The foremost candidates thus far are: C++ with OpenGL and some set of appropriate libraries, HTML5 + WebGL, and, of course, Unity. I'd kind of like to use as much of my existing code as possible, but the most important thing is getting the game done and making it good.

I don't know. I feel shitty about this because for a long time I've been driven, to some degree, by knowing how awesome a Flash game could actually look, if programmed efficiently and cleverly: However, at this point, I don't really feel like making Flash look good any more. The past months I've spent working in it... are looking somewhat misguided, now.

Oh well. Ideas?

So the event thingy says this ends at 4 on Sunday. Is everyone just gonna head home then or is there going to be some kind of after party or something? Just trying to figure out scheduling here.

I have no money but I want to make this happen. It's close to my birthday so maybe I can make something happen on that basis.

Still feel kind of awkward about how weird the last jam I went to was for me. Everyone was super nice but I had no idea what I was doing. My shit is considerably more together at this point in my life, though, albeit in ways that are only valued by me.

Playing with turn animations:

Ach, unfortunately falls a few days outside the duration of my stay in SoCal... probably, though I keep procrastinating on leaving. Oh wells.

Okay yeah, maybe I'll make a note to check and make sure that part works later on... if I can think of a place to put such a note where I'd actually remember it 

You think that would still look weird if it were matched up to an overall motion of the character in the environment?

The suggestion of using a forum for a one man project is super interesting. Is there a way to host something like that on a hdd, or would you need to get a webhost?

That being said, I like to make drawings, use my hands (to write, you pervert) when I'm brainstorming or just listing my needs. So I'm inclined to use paper or a drawing board first.

Yeah I've gotten into that habit when it comes to the creative stuff, and I was doing it for task lists for a while too until I started to dislike it for the reasons I mentioned. It's still cool for shorter term task-lists, like bugs I've noticed in a module I'm currently working on, I just dislike it for anything I'll be using more than a week or two into the future.

I really like the bent tree. Gives kind of a sense of history there.

Well, I think you can always print out the checklists if you need to work off of them on the train, and if you to add stuff it's not too hard to just jot it down and add it to your online worksheet later.

It's a valid concern, but I've had trouble with hard copies in the past: they're easy to make, but as the project changes they get invalidated and I usually end up discarding them and that's 100% of the work down the drain. With this, I can feel comfortable that I can modify it later on without having to redo the whole thing, which makes me a lot more comfortable investing my time into creating the task list in the first place.

Well the main idea I had for the idle cycle was that she would be perfectly still and just her clothes/hair would be animated by the wind or whatever. It is a little bit tricky to get into and out of that state without it looking weird, though.

BTW, for anyone else reading this looking for useful scheduling things, I'd suggest you check out Trello. I've been using it to construct to-do lists and I'm finding it super useful to get this stuff out of my head and into a list of items-- one which I can easily see an overview of and which feels a bit more professional and permanent than notes on a legal pad. Right now I'm bouncing back and forth between planning out the basic flow of my game on a legal pad, transcribing/editing those ideas into design document files, and then planning a task-list based on the tasks and assets suggested therein.

I think once I have the task list complete, it should be relatively easy to construct milestones out of these task lists. Then, it's just a matter of meeting them. Exciting! 

Bleh still sticking with photoshop because I know it and it works okay for moderately high res graphics. I cut the resolution, though, because these are just for planning and it was making things run slower than they had to.

So, okay, I've been playing around with transitioning into and out of the run cycle. It's a bit jerky, but here's where it's at right now:

Part of the reason it's so jerky is because I'm trying to have something that I can naturally transition into from a bunch of different nearby frames without looking too weird. I could probably make it look better if I was sure which frame it was coming from, but oh well. The way it is now, it gives a kind of snap to the animation which might actually work out well. I'll probably try to get more animations done and reevaluate this later when I see how it works with them.

I guess more specifically what I'm wondering is are your project milestones that tightly localized to one aspect of the project, IE design->code->asset production, or are they a bit more vertical slicey, like level 1->level 2->level 3 etcetera, or something in between?

Also, Xienen, what would some of those milestones look like?

[real]

Thanks, this is giving me some interesting ideas to think about (also I felt kinda down about having no responses after a day, so this makes me feel a bit better, heh). Right now I've just been taking down notes on a legal pad, since I find there tends to be less resistance for me when making marks on paper than there is in starting a computer file (I can always make the file later). So, around the time I was writing this post, I made these:


The left sheet is a breakdown of the broad categories of work required for the project, IE level flow (I guess one would consider that the design document), level architecture, entity behavior, etcetera. The right sheet is a breakdown of the intro sequence with each of the things required to be completed in each category: Almost certainly incomplete, and eventually will require a further breakdown for what goes into each of those tasks, but a guideline anyway.

Now, having gotten that far, I'm very quickly getting discouraged in this work. It doesn't feel like real work, even though I know it will probably pay dividends in the long term. Ironically, I think it's listing out all of the things that need to be done that tends to make me restless with working on the schedule.

That design flow makes a lot of sense Paul. I've been kind of jumping from thing to thing, maybe it would make more sense to completely finish one part of the project before moving onto the next. I tend to get restless when I work on one thing, but that's no worse than the other emotional garbage I have to fight through to get something done. How close do you stick to that style of schedule?

[nothing]

I wasn't sure where else to put this. If there's a more appropriate forum for it, feel free to move it there.

So, basically, as I've begun to take this whole game dev gig more seriously and try to move forward, it's become more and more apparent that aside from the 'creative' stuff (art, music, etc) and the 'technical' stuff (code, frameworks, etc) that there's a third discipline that's necessary to finish a project, which would be I guess the logistical stuff. These are the things that, in a larger project with more specialized roles, would be under the purview of the producer: Delineating what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and scheduling hours towards achieving that goal.

I dunno about you guys, but I hadn't anticipated that on top of having to be a programmer, an artist, and a composer I would have to be a producer as well. It was a considerable tripping point for me. It had simply never occurred to me until I had multiple discipline failure meltdowns, and I had to think long and hard about why it kept happening. The fact is, however inspired I am, I usually come to a point at which I'm confused about what aspect of the project to work on next, and nothing saps creative energy like confusion.

So I guess the purpose of this post is twofold. First, I want to make people more aware of this as a separate discipline that needs to be practiced: In fact, I think this issue is why it tends to be taken as a truism that, for the most part, only the small projects get finished. If we train this skill, we can approach larger projects with less risk of them collapsing-- and, for those of you who already intend to tackle large projects, I hope that perhaps this post can save someone the years of confusion I had to work through.

Second, I'm looking for pointers, useful software, techniques, or whatever else regarding this kind of discipline that I can apply to my own work. Right now, I mostly get by by writing up daily schedules for the next day at the end of each day. Something like "1hr animation, idle cycle" or "2hr coding, display class" or whatever. This helps keep me focused on basically what I should be working on, but has the considerable drawback that if whatever I pick out to work on isn't clicking at the moment I can't really switch over to another part of the project. If I had a master list of everything that needed to be worked on at any given time, it would give me far greater flexibility, but developing that kind of project outline is a job unto itself.

So: Whatcha think, tigs?

Some big beasties I drew.

I really like the bodies, but the faces look cartoony to me-- I think because the forward facing eyes make them look like human faces with monster snouts instead of beast faces to me.

Dunno. Could be what you're going for, but it bothers me a little.

... I would use such a post icon.

(am i emoticon right?)

What do I do if I'm a generalist (programmer, musician, artist, and writer) looking for work? Where's my post icon?