Development Log - 22 June 2019

This will be the first of plenty of development logs documenting what the development process will be like so I don't end up spewing all of my ramblings on Twitter. As much as I hate to be starting this log now instead of at the very beginning of my development journey, it's better late than never. (It also serves as the site's first post so I can tweak anything else I missed in design.)

Today I spent more time snooping around the Transport Station level, mainly for design inspiration. Plenty of questions came to mind, but I was able to learn more about KeyFramers from that Finder in the center of the level. Knowledge I plan to use for creating the introduction cutscene - which has finally settled on a foundation I think I can work with. The general idea is this: the camera moves along different environments, with credits text appearing similar to the way text pops up in a Borderlands intro (Borderlands 1, mind you; I really don't want to make 3D letters for everything. Nuh-uh. Nope). It'll go through some iterations, but I think it'll look real cool and unique when it's done.

Really, all that's left is to learn about occluders and how to make an O shape. Not a circle, but a ring, something that's much harder to do in DEdit than you might expect (and I hate that). But when you're pretty much stuck using just DEdit and unable to use the tools Monolith had, it's gonna seem pretty insurmountable. I can't make maps the same way Monolith did because they decided, instead of making their software competent enough to create anything quality, they just used an early version of Autodesk Maya and just imported the geometry. Screwing over modmakers before the game even released. Brilliant.

Not much else to say for today - a majority of this was just iterating things I've said in the past anyways. As I go along with these logs, they should be more coherent and structured. I'll be making posts of other varieties, including changelogs and any major development updates, separate from these logs. I won't have a set schedule to post these, as I personally don't see a point in doing that when this project will be very long-term, but suffering to the point of mental breakdown is all part of the journey when it comes to game development, so who knows?

/-/END OF LINE/-/