Migrating to a different machine.

Changelog

• No changes published

Not a lot of work has been done with Jelly Hunters since the last upload. Instead I've migrated to another laptop, I was building the first demo on a machine that does not have a graphics card. I've moved to an older model that has a weaker CPU but does have a GPU, the Jelly Hunters demo already gets an FPS that is twice as high. The laptop does need a new battery and is definitely showing its age (it's from 2014) but I think I'll get by with it better than my previous machine. It takes longer to open up a project but once it's open, I get way better performance due to the presence of the GPU. 

I've also been thinking more about the name Jelly Hunters, what ever this game is going to be when it's done, I don't think it's going to be what I envision for the thing I call Jelly Hunters in my head. I'm guessing I'll rename this at some point but I'll go with Jelly Hunters for now. 

I've been playing some more games, finally got around to trying out Microsoft's xCloud service that comes as a part of Game Pass. Playing things like Halo and Fallout New Vegas on my phone with a controller is an excellent experience. It definitely feels like I'm living in "the future". 

I'm also realizing that the work I have to do can currently be divided into two categories. There's design work I have to do and technical work to do. On the design side I have vague notions of a story or at least level order for this game, but every time I go to figure it out into the editor I choke up. So I need to figure it out on paper first. I've read in the past about sketching and top down layouts and tried my hand at those but I still had the same issue with a blank page. Something recently clicked though, in no small part to a few twitter threads (1, 2, 3, 4) I saw that helped be properly visualize how it grows step by step. 

The technical side is all the actual work of putting it into the game engine and hooking up all the moving parts. I definitely have lots to learn there as well but without a blueprint, I don't know what to learn that will help most next. All of this should have been obvious to me. I sketch my designs at work before I do them on the computer. So while there's an empty changelog this week, I'm still making some progress so I'm happy about that. 

Level design notes

Some of my paper notes for this redesign of the first cave level

Game Design Resources

Rachel Hwang - Procedural Buildings with Formal Grammars - I watched this excellent presentation. It's not directly relevant to the Jelly Hunters project. But I think is useful for a few other ideas I have.