Tackle Your Bigs Risks… Prototyping

In my spare hours, in between writing and family obligations, I’m continuing with my unity prototype. I’ve been having fun with it but today I had to take a step back. I really want to dive into AI and combat, but I realize that these, while complicated system, are ones I’m confident I can get working properly. What I’m more concerned about is my ability to generate environments.

So, this means diving into the technical details of creating the necessary environments — and abandoning the simplistic testing environment I’ve been using — but also figuring out how to make “worthy” environments for the concept. Part of the challenge here is that I’m merging some gameplay genres together and on the surface the game could easily slip into being just another platformer (which is okay, if that was my goal, but I want something with strong RPG exploration elements). So my progress is probably going to be really impeded… not only do I not know much about Unity level building, I’m also struggling to build a representative environment that captures the feel I’m looking for. And once I make that area I need to convince myself that I can build a few dozen more like it — or come up with the means to generate them.

In other news…

For those interested in my writing progress, I’m pleased with my effort so far. I do find it easier to write fiction than non-fiction, and I’m about 20K words into Novel #6 (sequel to Novel #5). I’ve written the introduction and the climax and I’m just finishing up the conclusion bits (after that I tackle the middle parts). For the last few novels I’ve been working off of ever-more detailed outlines (my current outline is 25K words… I’ve been reading a few new ‘how-to’ books and coming up with other ways to look at my outlines… and hence I’m adding more details). This book also has a large number of subplots, which I think will make it larger than its predecessor.

Anyways, that’s it for now. Hope everybody has a great week.