Reverie Update

Hello, it’s been a while. I’ve been meaning to write another blog for a while now, but every time I remember, I’ve either just gone to bed, or I’m on a position where I don’t have the time or the ability to write one up, and then when I am I forget to. So here I am, now let me tell you about some of the things that have happened since the last post.

Well the first thing that I worked on after the last post was a portal effect, I wanted to connect the multiple levels we had in the game without having to actually put them next to each other, which wouldn’t have worked, given that each level was entirely different from the last. So the portal effect made it seem like you were walking through a door that went to another world, I had a bit of trouble with this, and required help from my lecturer to get it working.

The next thing that I was required to do was get all the levels we had in their unfinished state and combine them for a demo that we were to show at Uni, and I did it, there was a lot of the game that wasn’t implemented, but the player could travel from level to level, and door would open for them. But sadly the game didn’t want to load on the day that we were to present it, so we weren’t able to show it off.

From there the designers worked on their levels more, until last week where I needed to start building the final version of the game, I got the portal effect implemented, it works kind of well, but only on the Macs at Uni, any other computer makes the portal effect look off. I got almost everything implemented in the final build that we were to show off at a Uni run expo, which happened last night. I stayed up until six in the morning working on the game. I needed to upload the game to google drives to my teammate could get the game and work on it on the last day we had, but it turns out google drive is shit when it comes to large files, so I had to go in and delete some things to make the folder size smaller so it could fit on my USB. When I was doing this I found out that Unreal was being a dick and moved most of the levels away from the position I had placed them in, this caused all sorts of problems, the main one being that players couldn’t travel to each level, they would just appear in empty sky. So I ended up putting the project on a USB, travelled down to flinders street station and handed it off to my teammate who met me there and then travelled back home.

So the night of the expo comes on, and it’s held in a very small venue in a small dark alley, the music was very loud so no one could hear any of the game sounds, and it was very crowded. We didn’t actually end up being able to show off our game. Another bug that appeared was one that didn’t allow us to package the project, so we had to bring in the unpackaged version, and there was the problem of the levels moving, and when we move the levels we need to rebuild all the lighting or the game becomes very laggy, so we gave it ago, but it was taking way to long and other people needed to use the computer, so we had a beer, cried a little then went home.

Now I’m here sitting at home, writing this blog. My job is basically done for this project, I might need to fix a couple things, but my last week in this trimester will be spent focusing on making a tool and doing a bit of AI to satisfy the KPI requirements.

In other news, I’m on a sort of trial period with a small indie games company called “GoodGame Productions” it’s not much in terms of pay, but hopefully it will be good experience for me; they use a framework called Cocos2d-x which I’ve never used before, and I’m having a little trouble getting started with it, but once I get started I should be okay.

Well there you have it, a nice little update for anyone who cares, I’ll post a blog later in the week about the tool I’m trying to make. Till next time,

Nathan out!