I was supposed to update here last (Saturday) night but I simply failed to do so.  I have some fairly big remodeling projects going on at my house and I was just too tired to bother.  I’m not too upset about it, and I’m posting today.  This week I made some good progress.  At this point the “game” has some significant features:

• A player character (sphere placeholder for now) that can move around a scene using WASD
• A camera that follows the character and which the player can zoom and rotate around
• Custom built collision detection between a unit sphere and arbitrary geometry.  This is completely un-optimized but still mostly works.

Things I’ll be working on this week:

• Loading and moving a character with animations rather than a placeholder sphere
• Adding and improving assets in the game’s main village

Speaking of the village, here’s an updated view of the harbor.

Hopefully this gives an idea of the visual style I’m going for.  This is rendered in Blender but hopefully I can pull off the same low-poly bright look and feel with THREE.js.  There are still SO, SO, SO many things to figure out and implement, but I’m having fun so far and plan to keep at it, so stay tuned.

As I said in my last few posts I worked with CreateJS for a while and was able to make a little progress here and there.  Although I’ve seen some really fantastic pixel art games, I’m just not a pixel art guy.  So while I could create a 2d game with graphics that look like they were made by an eight year old, ultimately that’s just not what I want.  So I’ve decided to change directions once again, and it’s back to THREE.js.

This time around I’m doing things a bit different.  First, the story I am developing is a simpler and aimed more towards adult humor.  Nothing raunchy, just references to alcohol and some dirty jokes.  Second, I’m sticking to a specified schedule for development.  I have a certain amount of time each day devoted to specific tasks.  Monday through Friday is artwork and coding.  Saturday is marketing and social media.  Sunday is planning and administration.  This means I’ll be posting here every Saturday and eventually will move into posting on Twitter, Instagram, etc.  I’ve only been doing this for a week at this point and I’m already quite pleased with the progress I’ve made.  Since the amount of time I want to spend every day on this project is specified in the schedule it’s a bit like punching into and out of a job.  I sit down, I work on whatever the task is for that day, and then I quit.  This both forces me to do something every day and prevents me from going on binges where I spend hours and hours every day for several days in a row, then get burned out on the whole thing.  Hopefully this will continue to be an effective way to develop the game.

Speaking of the game, I don’t want to say much in terms of details right now but it’s a 3d single player RPG set on a small island.  Here’s a very, very early art preview of the harbor and some bridges:

As I said, I’m making decent progress and really hope to be able to keep moving ahead at a relatively steady pace this time around, so stay tuned.