Finding that groove again (Patreon)

Working on a bunch of stuff right now!  

There's the miner's outfit zbrush sculpt that still needs a quick detail pass and then can go to the low poly stage.

There's the gray block outs for the main buildings in the swamp town.  I've started working on the sculpts for the different tiling textures and should start putting those together soon.  

The frog dudes I was working on their AI tree.  This is going to be part of a larger AI system pass that's going to take a while to fully realize.  This first step I'm going to start making NPCs non-hostile by default around the player.  But if the player readies their weapon and gets too close to an NPC then that NPC will attack the player.  There's a bunch of other stuff I'll need to add like text barks or sounds to warn the player to step back or put away their weapon.  Then combining this with NPC patrol routes and activity AI.  The general idea and ultimate goal is to make a completely pacifist playstyle fun and viable but still give the player the option to choose violence.  

I also finally got the animated text plugin working!  For some reason my character class was deleting all the rows out of the data tables and it was an entire thing.  I ended up rebuilding the dialogue UI and stripping out the character class calls and so far it's been working.  There's still testing to do and also creating all the text animation functionality but it should add some more flavor to text.

IRL update

So that last studio gig didn't go so well.  

There's a whole list of things that I could go into which seem to be common trends across the video game industry - the focus on using outsource studios instead of hiring fulltime employees, the push to use AI generated content in the art pipeline, a group of isolated c-suite individuals that make new demands for features based upon whatever game they played (or watched being played) over the weekend, the focus on copying money making features from other games and then building a game around those features, the layer of middle management that has no actual function other than going to and scheduling more meetings, oh and pushing for community made content that the company can then monetize but not pay the actual creatures for.  None of this is new or unique and maybe I was just being naive thinking that "maybe this studio will be different".

I'm also at the point in my career where in order to advance I have to move into management.  For years I've turned down management or lead positions but this time around I thought "maybe it'll be different for me" and the paycheck looks pretty good, right?  Nope, I was so very wrong.  I don't think I'll ever understand why companies promote people out of positions where they can use their skills, skill that they've been developing for years, and into positions that have nothing to do with those skills.  

So yeah, I put in my 2 weeks notice and left.

I realize that with everything going on in the world that these are pretty minor issues by comparison and I'm not trying to make them feel earth shattering.  I'm still very lucky being in a position where I can walk away from a job and not face serious consequences for it.  But I did want to let people know what's going on since for the last chunk of time I've been limping along.  

My current plan is to dive deep into Feign and find that happy place where I can enjoy game development again.  I'll have to sort out the financial situation at some point but I'm going to burn through my savings for the next month or 2 and see how things are looking for 2024.  

But feel free to drop me a message or comment if you have any questions or anything!  I'm trying to keep things sort of vague so I don't call out a specific company and also trying to keep this post from getting ridiculously long!