Level Design, and one long day.

I've been here since 9am, and it's getting close to 10pm now. It's been a very long sunday, but we did get a fair bit in today. Posted below is the level design flowchart for the level. At least a draft. The numbered areas have to be all filled in but the idea is simply to get the level logically playing out with all the things we want, and then try to construct this virtual tesseract. There's still more things to add, but once done, we will go through and do a mental walk through of every size and try to round up any last large design gaps before we actually commit this to physicality. It should be noted that we have made a number of levels already, but the problem is when you construct things first, you pretty much miss out on a ton of things you couldn't otherwise fathom. So level design has been a joyful nightmare. I only wish we had more time.

The rest of the day we've been working on getting up code for a very rough hud. (And I DO mean rough.) And I took a crash course in bot AI, which of course crashed my computer.. multiple times. I did get them to stand there and look threatening. So it's a start. Finally trample seems to work ok. You trample things you should based on your size. Makes sense.

This is all for milestone one, so really if we can get things working at even the most base level, but have everything there, it's a major victory for us. Again, I really have to stress HOW much extra time it takes to do the polish. To give you an example with the bots. It will likely take me a solid week to get them working decently. To get something that would impress people, that would take months. That little bit extra takes insane amounts of time, simply because you have to go back and tweak things. Then you get a good idea on how to optimize things better. But doing that requires you rewrite a huge chunk of code.. I hope you are starting to see how it goes.

I've always respected blizzard and nintendo for taking their sweet time when it comes to getting a game out. They are notorious for having some of the longest wait times for their games to come out. But you can tell the difference when you play.

I'm headed home to sleep. I have classes early tomorrow morning.