Sorry for being so incommunicado lately! Lot's of background stuff going on with the game and not much to show for it, as with building a house we are reaching the point where many of the foundations have been laid down and soon every update will have something appealing to see.
I'll admit I took a brief respite from hard dev'ing in order to play The Last of Us 2 recently, which was the sequel to my favourite game of all time. I had been highly excited to play it for the 7 long years Naughty Dog took to make it, but found the game to be ..well...sadly quite dissatisfying. Graphics, audio, gameplay etc all setting the bar for other PS4 games to match, but I wasn't happy with the 'brave' direction they took the story in at all. I always feel that at the end of the day making games- even horror games, is certainly about giving the player pause for rumination and provoking them into questioning the meaning and justifications for someone's actions under a given set of circumstances-- but boy oh boy does that game takes a deep and highly questionable dive into misery for the sake of subverting expectations, and almost approaches a snuff-movie level of distastefulness with the excessive gore and cheap shock deaths. The fanbase seems divided which was something the writers said they were expecting and saw from their focus tests prior to release. I think dividing your fanbase in order to stand out from the crowd is absolutely bananapants- from a business perspective if nothing else, but also- why the hell wouldn't you want all your poor fans to enjoy all the fruits of your labour? And why is merely giving the fans what they want such a crime these days? Anyway, label it the cost of high art or reinventing the whell or whatever, but I know I'm not alone in thinking the game was a bit of a catastrophe. A damn shame. Anyway, the newly releaseed Ghosts of Tsushima is looking like a nice palatte cleanser and here in Japan where -funnily enough- I'm roughly only 60km from Tsushima, the promo bandwagon is in full swing. Seeing people gush over the game's pretty aesthetics has given me a renewed love for the beauty of the countryside I live in over here with my Japanese wifey, and I can't help but think what a good life decision it was for me to come over here 15 years back.
Ok back to the game. As I've said, sorry for the lack of updates, but it takes forever to get anywhere in Unity development as a one-man team, and so much more work to put in than a simple Flash Point'n'Click. Hurdles every step of the way. This time it's appropriating bones and their weighting for the armatures of some of the characters in Blender that's giving me headaches, plus coding some of the activation events/triggers such as a doors opening and camera angles. I'm working on some simple cinematics, one at the moment where The Bandaged Man looks out of the window of his makeshift prison to see Project K patrolling the estate. In Flash that would be a couple of measly hours of artwork but in three-dimensions I have to rig Project K and The Bandaged Man properly, keyframe some animations, create forest terrain, rain pouring, fog, baked lighting, mipmaps...ugh...
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Sometimes I wonder if I'm not nuts doing all this, but you know, what the hell right? It's a hobby.
