Jul 17, 2017
My game!
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My game!
It built!!! Super happy, the problem lay in two asset names that were too long!
Hit or miss...
Well, I got Hua, the Highlighter in this afternoon.
BUT, her idle pose is seriously, seriously off-kilter. NO IDEA why!
Anyway, I really need to stop and get ready for penultimate lesson!!! of 3 years!!!
And along comes Pepe! Thank goodness. Only one more character to go, and it’s only mid-day Monday. So...if all goes well with Hua, this afternoon, then I am on track to finish and submit Wednesday evening.
Have a massive list of tiny weeny little things I’ve been noticing in each run through, mainly to do with the positions of the question triggers - but it’s all good, they are tidying up tasks. Although there is the niggle of the build not working yet so reminding myself that it will, it will, it must, it must - and praying that one of the tutors will be able to tell why not tonight!
Penny runs!
It’s been another busy day working on the game - including an interlude, i.e. a trip into town - to school - to check that the previous builds work in Jane’s classroom. This is because the room is being used all day, so when I pop in on Tuesday for playtesting, I want to simply plug the newest build via usb into her computer, and we can play in the last half hour of her class with her students.
Basically was just making sure that none of the shenanigans happen again, due to prerequisites for Unreal not being let through the firewall, as per the playtest before the last.
All went well, luckily, so then I came home and got on with another attempt to build the game. I cleaned up the contents folders, deleted old hang about assets - namely in the fonts folders, as when I had moved them, they hadn’t redirected correctly, and there were even some widgets not in use (but will be if I continue the game) that had been referencing those fonts..
Nonetheless, after the clean up the build failed otra vez. However this time the message that popped up said something wonderful about shaders... oh boy, I really hope someone can help me with this in classes tomorrow night as I can’t fathom having done all of this work to not have a build ready by Wednesday!
Must.Trust.Universe.
In the meantime, anyway, although it looked like I would never get the newer characters in and running, but somehow, at 1am in the morning, I managed to get Penny running. Cross fingers I can do this easily with Pepe and Hua as I think I have realised what step I was missing (i.e. in the skeleton tree, setting some of twisty bones to skeleton and not to animation).
Sound makes all the difference
After doing a food run this evening, I came back and worked on some more sound effects, tidied up the character dialogues and added in UI button presses. I also added in some ambiance in the form of seagulls and wave crashing on the shore. Nice, really nice.
Meshes for Hua, the Highlighter, (who now looks like a ninja rather than a sweet girl!) and the very gorgeous Muslim Penny are complete.
Neither are animated, re the problems I had with Pepe, but yesterday I decided that their lack of animation isn’t as important as simply just having them in - if they slide along perhaps I can blag that they are writing devices so should slide instead of run (nah, the bloody game’s called RunGrammarRun!)
However, am, myself, running out of time and if I sit fiddling about in this area for many more days it will not save me from the rest of the game change tasks that are a far higher priority. So, instead I will return to the characters later - it’s now mid-day, Saturday and I’ve been here since the morn.... so I really need to have a break now, then come back do the rest of audio, change the star particles and update questions this afternoon...
Oh! And I saw a really interesting job advertised as a serious games developer/researcher, so somehow I also need to find time to write a cover letter, and get an application sent through. Life’s certainly not dull.
Better the devil you know
Decided to test the building now rather than wait until Monday to discover a problem.
And... BUILD FAILED. It’s a strange one, an unknown cook error, possibly related to memory (?) on my computer - see above red on the disk column...
I may have to go into Futureworks tomorrow or Sunday and test there, to find out if it still fails on their computers or if something entirely else is the matter.
YIKES, like I have time for that.