Pablo: He's been working on the revised AI War intro theme, and holy smokes it gives me chills. He sent me a text with a cell phone video showing it playing and all the instrument lines, and even with that crappy audio of a phone video it was amazing.
Blue: She's been modeling away on various "prestige ships" for the most part, but also doing a bit of animating today. I'm really excited with how her stuff is turning out.
Keith: He's been working on more "stuff for the actual game" in terms of coding and whatnot.
Cinth: He's finished the race-based ship design stuff, and is at least a goodly ways into the AI side of it (I haven't looked, I confess), and from what I've looked at in quick fashion and what we've discussed I'm really excited about it. I haven't gone through in detail yet and vetted it enough to go onto the design document, but it's really good stuff that should paint a really good picture of the goals for the start of alpha.
Me: I... have been driving myself nearly to tears every day, lately. It's just so incredibly depressing and frequently upsetting, I don't mind admitting. "Visual representation of too much stuff" is driving me mad in general, although I've had detours into various "framerate versus detail" issues and "why doesn't that batch" issues.
I don't like the tradeoffs between clarity, beauty, and completeness that I keep coming up against. The original AI War was absolutely something I loathe looking at at this point, and a lot of that comes from the fact that you spend almost all your time zoomed way the heck out. It kills my sense of immersion and scale. Sure there are a bajillion little icons moving around, okay fine, but it doesn't give me any sense of true scale to have that there. Sure there are some ships that are drawn larger than others, but overall I don't really get a sense of TRULY massive ships, personally at least. The small ones have to be big enough to still be visible, and with pixel art there's only so much you can do.
I also don't like how the color requirements that get created by throwing "player color, mark level number and color, and action status (attack-move, FRD, etc" all into the icons causes. It makes it so that the ships can only be identified in far-zoom mode by shape alone, and that's just no darn good. It also makes it so that when you're zoomed in during Classic, you can't see important info like the mark level or action status, so you're at such a disadvantage that you need to zoom right back out again.
I HATE the artificial divide between far zoom mode and close zoom mode. I want more of both things to cross over more organically, without turning both into an unintelligible circus. It feels like a herculean task, or a logical impossibility, to the point where I've been really inclined to throw out mark level, player colors, or both for the sake of visual clarity. But those things then cause problems of their OWN, so I've been more recently looking into a better way of handling that instead.
What is scariest is how this can play into delays to starting the kickstarter. The kickstarter needs to be freaking super compelling from every angle, and it also needs to neither be i) lies and misleading stuff like you see with a lot of games nor ii) underselling what we can actually do here. The paradox that this creates for me is palpable.
And then there are 100+ forum threads that I have yet to respond to, and in some cases yet to even read. Ho-lee-cow. And I still need to do a bunch of other sections of the design document. And have a video and all the rest of the kickstarter stuff ready for next week. I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on visual stuff in the last week and a half, but I feel like that is so important for the video and absolutely one of the things that will help us reach the goal for the game.
So, life continues to be strange and uncertain and scary. That said, I'd really be enjoying the work here if I wasn't so stressed out from the schedule. And even despite that, I'm really having fun with a lot of the work. One thing that I do have to keep reminding myself is that things don't have to be perfectly optimized for purposes of the tech demo.
Anyhow, back to it. I think I've finally had the breakthroughs conceptually today that will get me out of the rut that I've been in, but it sure cost a lot of time to get here.
