So I haven’t been heard of for a while and thought I would share what has been going on behind the scenes the last weeks. Not much to be glad about I’m afraid, but there is some at least.

So my new game design document is coming along slowly. Did I say that that’s not really my forte? I’m not enjoying it either to be honest. But we are getting there. I have a lovely new UI for the event that highlites the new game structure and that I would have loved to show you – except that it is empty as of yet, because I have not finished my game design homework, lazy and somewhat unmotivated that I am. But I’ll post it soon, I guess.

The bad news is that I have been working on my boyfriends project the last month. Because guess what: he got people to pay him money for it! This is it btw if you are interested: http://www.starshipcorporation.com/. As you can see we got it crowd funded to level two and it’s not even over yet! That got me thinking again about doing the same thing for Party. It would have to be kickstarter though, because let’s face it: not that many people who want to have this game, so we cannot have it run on a crowdfunding platform that nobody has heard of. (Sorry indiegogo, I’m sure your time will come …)

The problem with kickstarter up to now was that you had to have a US bank account. Which we did not have because we are German! Yeah. But apparently kickstarter is going Europe. First UK, then hopefully the rest of us. Which means not very long now before we’ll be able to start our own campaign!

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So I’m really not going to make the schedule I so stupidly imposed on myself. I feel a little bad because some people might actually look forward to me completing the game. And did you notice the singular in the last sentence? Yes, at the moment I’m pretty much by myself, because David unfortunately has other stuff to do. Which is one of the reasons I’m not going to be in time. But I’m not going to blame it all on him, just a little. No, the truth is, I have had some big struggles with the game design the last month. I figured that if I made a game that I did not wish to play myself, than there was something not good about that. Don’t get me wrong, I have made games before that I did not care to play myself. But this time, it’s different, because: 1. There is just me. I cannot offload the stuff I hate to other people. 2. I have to make my own game design. Try that when you do not care for the game design you are producing. 3. I do not get paid. 4. I have only me to motivate myself. 5. I have an old and shitty computer that does not do the new hardware acceleration that I need for this game. I like the irony of this though: Me developing a game that my own computer cannot render.

So I had a huge drop of motivation last month, when I noticed I didn’t care for my own game. Don’t worry, I’m on the upward trend at the moment. I got a lot of inspiration from watching Let’s Play’s on Youtube, specifically Might and Magic Heroes VI. Yes, these bastards had to turn the title for the sixth installment around. As if nobody would notice. Oh and by the way, I’m actually old enough to have played the original Might and Magic series, so yes, that feels like a really stupid move to me.

I’m getting side tracked here. What has Heroes got to do with Jane Austen’s Party? Not much, one would assume at first glance. But no, they gave me a brilliant idea for character development and character actions – that I’m going to carry out as soon as I can render a scene with more than one character in it. This computer that I have is really starting to annoy me on that scale. It actually helped me keep performance down the first couple of month, because it had to render everything with the CPU, thus forcing me to keep everything very low-poly. Which even impressed other developers. Not the low-poly, but the amount of characters and animations I got to render at the same time. But now I’ve somehow crossed this thin line of being able to render with more that 5 FPS. Don’t know why exactly, but anyway I decided that it was time to buy a knew computer. The lovely people of Dell didn’t think so though, and I have been waiting 3 weeks for the thing to arrive now. Hopefully it will come at the end of this week. I’m doing UI stuff and windows for now, that’s all my dying computer can take at the moment. Did you see the last three screenshots? I did that. Yeah! I’m pretty proud of myself, because, as mentioned before, I’m not a graphics artist. And even David doesn’t feel a strong urge to go over my designs for the final version.

So I know, that’s somehow bad news. But the upside is: it’s going to be a much cooler game, when I’m finished. At least I think so. OK, maybe some people might find it to be a bit too complex. I’m really planning on getting a good arc into the game, but one never knows. I would understand if people didn’t want to play that. I really want fluffy games sometimes, especially for the in-between times, when I want to relax, not think harder. So that might be a problem. But since I’m not really convinced anymore that I’m ever going to make any money with this, I might as well please myself. That’s the beauty of only being accountable to myself – I have absolute power over where I want this game to go. Not a good note to end? Don’t worry. It’s really going to be a cool game. Just throw your preconceptions over board and be ready to be challenged more than expected and everything will be fine.

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This is the new GUI that I have been working on for the character interaction.

(The left side is completely my design, a fact that I’m pretty proud of – since I’m not a graphics artist!)

Today then I tried to position the 3d part of the menu so that it looks nice. This is how it went for most of the day:

Tweaking some rotation or position value by 2 pixels

Waiting 1 min for the menu to compile

Waiting 1 min for the copying of the menu to the right folder + starting the game

Waiting 3 mins till the loading has finished

Hovering above the Start Event Button until the framerate is back to normal

Waiting 30 sec until the characters have been loaded and moved to their spot

selecting one character, trying to select the other character

have the 3d menu pop open and deciding that maybe 2 pixel was too much

Going back to the 3d menu to tweak the rotation and position just 1 pixel

Waiting 1 min for the menu to compile

….

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Footman Preview

Most of the time I work alone at The Project, as David has other stuff that he needs to work on fulltime. So new graphic input is always an event that gets my motivation right up again. (David has not authorized me to share, but I’ll do it anyway.)

Oh, and since we last bested the hats we will now also be able to put wigs on these guys! I can’t wait to lay my hands on them … I have been working so hard on getting these footmen to actually do the tasks that I assign them, lazy bast—. No, it’s my fault of course, for not being a better housekeeper, I guess. But it’s coming along slowly and I am proud to announce that serving at a buffet table is not a total embarressment anymore! – I think I deserve this treat!

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