Devlog#6: Autobio Midterm Pt 3

This week for Intermediate Game Development... we read "10 Things I Learned In One Year Of Keeping a Devlog" by J. Kyle Pittman

And we had these questions to keep in mind:

• which of those 10 things resonates with you? why?
• what did you do last week?
• what are you going to do next? do you have any concerns?
• how do you feel about your progress so far?

I think out of those 10 things, "I still can’t estimate tasks." is something that rings so true for me. So many things can get in the way of a task whether they're bugs, events, and other things going on in life. It's the reason why I plan a day or two at a time and I don't plan the whole week at once anymore. Some days I just don't feel like drawing and on days I give myself the task of making music I want to draw.  Furthermore like sometimes the amount of energy and motivation I have effects how quickly I can complete a task so I can't really accurately estimate how long something will take because the human body is funky. It does what it wants and if I force myself to do a two frame animation while tired, it will take longer than I expect it.

Anyway, onto the midterm project. 
This past week I made all the models that are going to be in the game, created more moves for characters and actually set up how the hallway is suppose to look like. I changed the designs a lot for the models compared to the sketches from week 5 mainly because I was kind of just going with the flow because I was in a funky mood. I think it turned out alright, but I need to finish adding materials to some of them.
Next week I'm going to make sure I take the time to polish this project so it's getting across the ideas I want in the game ( along with having music in it!) The only concern I have for next week is making sure I take time for it.

If I'm being honest, I'm very frustrated and disappointed with the progress I made this week. Well, actually that's not true. I'm happy with my progress with the 3D models even though I know I won't be able to teach myself how to bone rig them before next week. However, I know for a fact I didn't do my best with working on the actual Unity project this week. I was at Indiecade during a good chunk of last week and afterwards I had been working on other tasks I needed to do.

The problem is I guesstimated that the other tasks would take about 2-3 hours. As I said before,  I too can't estimate tasks. I spent more than 6 hours trying to complete a task that I badly wanted to get out of the way and after all the time it amounted to nothing. I could've limited myself to 2-3 hours, which I do sometimes, but other times I get stubborn and think "I'm almost done I just need to work a little longer". It's something I need to to start noticing more to make better use of my time. What I wanted to do this week is create a prototype that will make sense without me explaining it.

Currently you plop into the scene as a square and there's all these weird objects ahead of you that you can interact with. If you interact with them they say words and then a battle starts, but each battle is different. Sometimes you want to be friends, 'make a bond', with the character while others you want to break the bond you have.  On top of the different goals, you have different 'personas' that can use different moves and the moves can be effective against certain 'types' of characters.  There's just like layers and layers of stuff going on here and I was going to make it less complicated, but I didn't take the time to do it. For next week, I will make sure to manage my time well especially since I won't be traveling.

I think that's all I'll say for now to not spoil the final product. Below are screenshots of some models in the game.