Project 2: Dev Blog #4

It's a forth blog post!

If' you've missed the other posts you can view them here.

It has been a bit of a week, with everything going on in the US and some bits for me personally things had piled up and affected my work (both day job and game dev).

Finding that Balance

This is something that I don't usually go into, though I have touched on it in some tweets, I have somewhat of a weird balance when it comes to what I do.

Even though there are areas that I do both in my day job and game development (Feature/System design, programming etc), there are also those that are strictly game development (3D Modelling, Music Production, Narrative Design). These are what I see as two different kinds of itches I get when I want to do something, the logical itch and the creative itch. My day job more or less satisfies that logical itch I get for programming and designing things, and have game development cover the creative itch.

You'd think that would be fine right? I satisfy both of them.

It would be if I didn't have more of a need to do creative things, game development is my passion, creating is something I love to do and it's something I want to do more of. But I also don't want to eat into the time I want to talk to my partner, family, doing gaming etc.

Recently it's been getting a bit more difficult to stave off that wanting to create more and keep that balance, probably not helped with lock-down etc here in the UK. This reared its head in the last week where it took me the entire week to split down the next chunk of work for Project 2, stuff that I'd already designed mind you.

I feel like it's coming to a point where I need to re-assess when I want to shift into professional game development and how I can do so viably. Mainly so I can correct the balance I currently have and alleviate some of the stress from feeling stagnated.

Tiles and Ruins

As you have read above it took me a whole week to just split down the next chunk of work for Project 2, but I did find the drive to get some of it started!

I've been working on modelling the tiles and the ruin tops!

There are currently going to be three variations of everything mainly because I find myself getting distracted and three is currently all I can manage in one sitting.

I've found that my favourite tool in Blender is the cell fracture add-on, which I used excessively for Prophecy and have made use of in Project 2 for the ruin tops!

Things still need a bit of tweaking, but I think they are well done. Each of them done in a slightly different way than the others.

For the one where it's just a ring and no base, I used blenders physics system to have it look like it's shattered. Also, I had to put a vortex force in the middle to stop things flying in an outward direction.

The one with two broken pillars, I just deleted sections until I felt it looked right.
Finally got the one that has a ring and a base, I used the proportional editing functionality, where I'd pull the centre down a bit and pull out some of the edges to give it the look of something striking it.

I feel these turned out pretty well and will be doing more modelling for the rest of the top sections.

That's that for this week's blog post I'll hopefully have some more nice visual things done by next week!

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Have a good week everyone!