Keith and I have been talking, and the combat video I was working on was kind of frustrating me. I was working on it from a cinematic standpoint, but the cinematic creation tools I have were leaving much to be desired, and learning a bunch of new ones to select the best one was frustrating me.
I was getting increasingly irritated, because I just want to work on the game! And the underlying code is there for the combat, so just finishing up the visual integrations for that would be all I'd need to do.
Well, my hesitation about doing that sort of thing is that currently the underlying simulation doesn't use squads. Keith hadn't had a reason to prototype that bit yet, because it's relatively easy. Most of the hard part on that is visual and thematic, to do with them getting in formations, etc. And there's no way I have time to finish all that prior to Thanksgiving here.
Sooooo... long story short, he suggested just doing the combat visuals without squads first (which is nice because then he can get back to doing integrated dev work anyway), and then next week I can do another video with squads in them. This has the double bonus of showing you guys just how much difference the squads make to the visual flair of the game and the feeling of life and scale.
I'm down with that.
It wasn't what I'd originally planned, but it's a lot more productive in terms of bringing the actual first alpha builds closer, and giving you actual really-real gameplay footage rather than cinematic "these are the real graphics and roughly what gameplay would look like" visuals. Without the squads it will look a lot less interesting and more like AI War Classic in that sense, but then the upgrade you see in the span of a week (and frankly the videos thus far already give you a sense of that change) should be pretty palpable.
I like targets I can hit.
I had honestly forgotten that this week was Thanksgiving when I was planning out my schedule last week. Derp. Goes to show what tunnel vision can develop. Anyhow, I'm very pleased with a lot of things that are developing at this point.
