Monthly Archives: June 2020
The learning continues and decisions need to be made.
Its been awhile since my last post, however, thankfully not too long. I’m working my way through the Unreal Tutorials getting my head around areas of engine and the code base I had not touched before. So my preparation there is going well. I’m currently of two minds for doing artwork, one is to make use of Blender a remarkable 3d Modelling tool along with a decent renderer and other features I’m not likely to need in the short term or Maya which appears to have a more user friendly interface.
My mind is mostly made up based on Budget and ways to reduce overall cost while I’m learning modelling techniques, in the form of going with Blender, I’ve purchased some courses for character modelling and environment modelling in Blender for games, so hopefully, they will aid me in at least putting together some programmer art to get the game moving in the right direction.
The other area where I’ve needed to make choices is the game to focus on, I have a number of game ideas somewhat fleshed out, however, none to a degree I’m fully happy with. One option I’m swaying towards is that Oculus has announced the End of Life for the GO and the GearVR has been “dead” for a while, I’ve always wanted to migrate The Drowning Dungeons back to PC and to a complete and fully functional game that I had always intended to produce. Rather than the chopped down half sucked thing I did put out. Given the large number of changes that would occur here, it would be a re-imagining of the game rather than a reproduction of the Mobile VR version. It might be nice to get it on the quest as well though, so I’ll need to look into that.
As I have gone through and written out this little blog post, I find myself moving towards my goals for the next few months, and for now at least, I will be looking at Blender and re-imagining The Drowning Dungeons for PC VR.
Time keeps on slipping
Work has been crazy busy lately and I’ve had trouble focusing on what has needed to be done. I’ve continued to push forwards in my learning but felt I was getting sidetracked easily, and so I recently began tracking my time in a more convenient way. I purchased a Timeular device This not so little 8 sided dice provides a convenient Bluetooth connection to your PC or mobile device. Each face is able to be assigned to a task with a total of strangely enough 8 tasks able to be allocated on a device at a time. when the device is Perched in its base, all tasks are paused. After about 5 minutes setting up tasks, I spent my first day faffing around with the task tracking. It was very responsive and made sure not to track sub-minute tasks, which is good for when you can’t remember where the task is.
The device comes with a pack of stickers that you can use to decorate your tracker, For me, I split my times up into Break, Work – Development, Work – Meetings, Work Documentation, and Emails, Savage Cabbage – Work, Savage Cabbage – Learning and Savage Cabbage – Design. I still have one slot free to fill in, which I’ll probably allocate to Marketing or something.
The one thing I’m not a fan of. The device is powered by a USB cable which you must first pull off a rubber faceplate to gain access to the charging point. Ok fine, BUT, there is a perfectly good base station which could have been set up to ace as a QI charging station, I realize this would likely have increased manufacturing costs, however I feel like I would be happy to pay an extra 10 bucks to just be able to plonk the device down on it’s base station at the end of the day, and know that tomorrow it would be ready to go for me.
So far I’m enjoying it, I’ll provide an update once I’ve got some time I can track and show (weekends) that are related to Savage Cabbage.
Thanks for reading.
Take care.