Monday 6 February 2017

State of the game - life is a mess and seeking help

The switch to unreal went quite fast and if you followed the stream you know the changes I made to the original concept. Lately I had a few problems with motivation and as a result I did not work on the game as much as I wanted to and I am way behind schedule (by about two month so far).

All that does not mean that I will abandon the game in any way. It simply means that the schedule I set for the streams and the work might not be the same as stated on twitch. The starting time of 10 in the morning is not really working for me most of the time. I was thinking of changing to a 12 to 20 schedule on Tuesdays and Thursday. The rest of the week will hopefully to schedule but I cannot assure that.

As to the game itself, all the old mechanics are in and the first quest is in as well (get beer). There is also the overarching main quest in but only the first two steps are achievable, the rest is not implemented yet. There are a few uncertainties in my original design that I need to figured out. Another thing that is not clear as of now is the visual style of the game on release. Originally I was thinking about a realistic style with me being able to design characters according to some parameters but I cannot easily use the same system in Unreal as I would in Unity.
Now, I was thinking of going the cartoony realism route, like WoW or Darksiders. The problem is that I cannot paint textures myself and I cannot create all environment models myself or it would just take way longer than a trained artist would need for the same work.
Apart from the art side of the game, I still need a lot of story and dialogue content which means a lot of writing and other aspects of the game need to be designed as well.
In a game about beer, there is no beer or any brewing yet, not sure how far I want to go. There is not enough to do in the game so far and I need to change that...

As to my life, it really is a mess, I do not know what is wrong with me but I will get some help soon and hope that I will be able to continue working on the game and get my life in check at the same time. So I hope you will understand this will be my focus first and foremost.