The second week of development has come to a close. This week was much more typical in terms of productivity and my overall work lifestyle. I ran into some programming issues, had some external ‘life’ issues, but got quite a bit done anyway.

WEEK #2

Originally, my goal for week two was to have a complete set of player mechanics implemented. As in, if the player was going to be able to shoot arrows, then that should be in the weekly build. Same goes for all skills that the player will adopt by the end of the game.

Challenges

However, things often get in the way of programming goals. I started with all mechanics that the player can perform without items (run, jump, wall jump, swim, etc). These were mostly quick, aside from swimming. From there I moved to actions that don’t require additional animation (block pushing/pulling). I got this out of the way and moved onto the mechanics for the initial dungeon.

The first dungeon that we will be creating is actually one of the last areas that you visit within the game. It is the water temple and I wanted to get it out of the way up front. This is mostly because it is the most complicated, mechanically. I need water physics. I need blocks that sink in the water. I need blocks that float in the water. I need the water level to change dynamically.

Basically, this lead to me spending almost the entire week on these mechanics. They turned out to be a bit more complicated than anticipated, but with them out of the way, most of the game’s programming will be a breeze from here on out.

Life

I had water level problems inside and outside of CATAM this week. I actually took a day off from development when my ceiling collapsed and flooded the first story of my house. Special thanks to the plumbers who ruined my living room this week!

I do find it ironic and almost hilarious that I was frustrating myself with water physics as my cracked pipes started to flood my house, but it has put us about two days behind in terms of my original goals. I’m pushing back our first playable milestone to next Saturday. That is mostly just to be safe. In the long run, we’re still ahead of schedule though.

More CATAM visuals coming soon! Jonathan got quite a few animations out of the way this week.

-Z