Book learnin'

I burned through one of two books already. I'm going to try to keep this from turning into a book report, but it was definitely a good read, and very necessary. It's given me a ton to think about, new ways to think about things, and pointed out a billion things I had completely missed. (see edit at bottom)

Armed with all this new knowledge, I stopped playing around with Blender and Unity and started writing and brainstorming instead. In just a couple days, I've scribbled out a dozen or so pages worth of ideas. Notes, maps, screens, sketches, half-assed ideas, lists, really bad ideas, all sorts of things. Now I'm refining them all and sorting them into coherence by typing them up. I can't type maps and sketches, but that's probably just as well. There's something fun and calming just writing up a bunch of bizarre ideas and seeing where they go.

Anyway, all of this has helped me get together some new ideas and a more focused direction for where I want to go with the game. My next big push is actually going to be going back to Blender to work on more vehicles. On the idea list, I'm up to 17 vehicles (and counting!). I have no idea how many are going to make the final cut, but I'm aiming for a minimum of 10. A bigger constraint on the number of vehicles isn't so much about making them visually different, but more about making them handle differently in the game.

I've come up with 4 basic modifiers for each vehicle, being Top Speed, Acceleration, Jumping Height, and Rotational Velocity (specifically, how fast they can turn around any 1 axis to perform tricks). It'd be frivolous and a waste of time to have 3 vehicles with otherwise identical stats, though I may circumvent this by adding special abilities per each vehicle. I've been toying with the idea, and while I like it, I'm currently a bit stuck trying to figure out what some of these things could do without completely shattering the balance of the game.   In the short term it may not be much of a problem, but later I want to (eventually) add competitive multiplayer, and if everyone only picks 1 specific vehicle all the time then everything else is just a waste.

I'm sure eventually it'll all get figured and sorted out. First thing's first though, need to get back to modelling. Not going to lie, it's not a fun gig for me. Ever since Mario 64 came out I've had problems with manipulating 3d objects in otherwise 2d space. The clunky ui in Blender doesn't make it easier, but at least I'm finally starting to get the basic concepts enough to do something worthwhile. Slow going, but it's picking up some speed. Will post pictures of new models/concepts in a week or so.



edit - The book in question is this one. I'm not trying to advertise or anything like that, but it's well worth it's price; more so since it's discounted. It's a bit cheesy at times and aimed towards beginners, but it's amazingly thorough, comprehensive, and easy to understand. I highly recommend it if you're starting out in gaming. It's mostly oriented towards wide-appeal adventure games, but the information is broken down far enough that you can apply it to almost any genre.

edit 2 - What the hell was the formatting error all about?