iteration

I put up a new build a bit ago, but you probably won't notice any differences. All th changes are under the hood. I'm rooting through and cleaning up code as I go. Bad shit goes out and slightly improved shit goes in.

This is all part of the iterative process.

Also being iterated, are all the graphics. The final look will hopefully be somewhere between story book paintings and slick art deco design. Figure that out... I haven't.

At the moment I am relearning some art tools that I used to be quite proficient at. I always spend so long between using certain tools that I almost always forget some of the most basic things about them. Every time that happens, it always reinforces this one theory in my brain. I think that a person can become an expert on a topic or at some skill, extremely quickly. Most individual skills can be picked up and developed in a matter of months, or even weeks. If you work on them continually for 1 or 2 years, you will most likely be an expert. Becoming a master will probably take the rest of your life, but becoming an expert... thats a pretty quick.

Only thing is, I don't think most people see it that way. I've had so many wildly different jobs in a fairly short period of time, that I have been forced to pick up new skills, become and expert in some, and then drop them to pick up an entirely new set of skills. Most of these skills are either so encrusted with rust that it would take a few weeks to get back up to speed, or they have been flat out forgotten.

Right now I'm learning to program in C#. If I kept at it, in a few years I would probably be an expert in whatever I was programming. That's not me being cocky, I think it really is just a matter of time and exposure to the task. If you ask me right now, I'm really not sure if I'll keep at it or not. I would definitely rather steer more heavily toward the art. Right now, I think I'll go reacquaint myself with some tools I used to be an expert in.

cheat added

so you want to be a cheater, and cheat.

I added a little reset button there in the bottom right. That button resets the color gauges and lets you keep messing around with the colors without having to restart when you run out.

cheater

I put that button in there for testing purposes, while I put in the code that lets you earn back color for making a close match. I will also be adding a cumulative score.

some better graphics and animated bits are in the works too. Soon it will be much nicer to look at, while you wonder why it isn't any fun.

new build and remembering activision

I put up a new build. I fixed some of the little quirks and pretty much moved everything over to mouse control. I added a little glow mouseover effect that I am not at all happy with yet... but what the hell, I'm gonna rip all the art out pretty soon anyway.

I've been reading this history of video games book... for the third time. I remembered something I thought I would jot down here. I got to the part about the founding of Activision... the company pulls in the GDP of a mid sized country now, so it's kind of fun to read about this company started by a hand full of dudes.

One day I was playing Sky Jinx on the old Coleco Gemini (a knock off of the atari 2600) and I remember reading in the manual that it was created by Bob Whitehead....

well holy crap

I knew on some level that people actually made these games, but to my feeble brain, it may as well have been sorcery. This dude. This fairly normal looking guy, he made the game I was playing. Didn't look like a sorcerer.... just a guy.

I spent a lot of school bus rides drawing game levels on foolscap after that.

Seems to me, I just never stopped doing that. Doubt that I ever will.

int? and mouse control

so if you want an integer to be null you have to type your variable as int?

and if you need to access a method in another script there is a really specific way to do that using c# for unity.... good things to know

so I have the last part of the mouse control working. You can now click on the center gem to lock in your color mix.

the next part is to add in the running tally of your score and add a way for you to earn back some color into your reservoir. At the moment, once you run out of a color you just can't mix any more... game over. not really much of a game is it.

There will also be a total overhaul to the graphics coming very soon.

more tweaks

today I made some more tweaks and edits to the resource management system.

now i just have to make it interesting or, god forbid, fun.

some tweaks and thoughts

I set up the resource gauges today. I'm one step closer to this actually being a game rather than some odd widget. Pretty soon here I will go into some detail about what I'm building. I'll probably just post up the link to the dev versions and let folks bang on it. The grand experiment would be to just do game development with the kimono wide open . Really give away all the details... I'm not sure if I have worked up the courage for that just yet.

I'll think about it.