OK, spring semester officially ended at my old school on Friday. Let’s see how I did.
In my defense, I spent a week in the hospital in April (plus a week out of work afterward), so cut me a little slack. One of my doctors also reminded me this whole deal is self-inflicted. It isn’t like I’m actually enrolled somewhere and have to ace this or have to retake classes at my expense. And really, “I spent a week in the hospital trying to keep my leg attached” is a pretty solid reason for a bit of a hiccup.
3D Art
I did the lectures and coursework for both classes, and finished the basic asset pack. I’ll add some more assets to it as I go forward, but it’s a good start. That said, I still have a lot of work to do in 3D art, especially when it comes to animation. Going forward I’ll be continuing 3D modeling and animation classes and work to get better.
AI
I did the lectures and coursework for all three classes. Learned quite a bit, and plan to apply it to the AIs I need for other projects.
Game Design and Development
I some work done on my vidgame projects. Not as much as I would have liked, but better than nothing.
FPS, Hovercraft Combative, Rokkit Combative, and ARPG
My latest hospital adventure wound up being a good news bad news deal for these projects.
Bad News: it ate a week because I was tied to a bed getting IV antibiotics 18 hours a day and stoned on oxy most of it. Any real dev work went right out the window at that point, and I couldn’t do much even after I got out because of aftereffects and after-care instructions from the doctors. So I didn’t get nearly as much done with these as I would have liked.
Good News: sometimes being high on schedule 2 narcotics can give you a different perspective. I’d been working on separate combat and damage systems for each of them since they were different games. There are fundamental differences between vehicle-on-vehicle action like the hovercraft or rokkit games and the more personal violence of the FPS or ARPG, right? Not as much as you’d think, really, if you like detail.
It hit me when I was working on the weapon and agent lists for the FPS and hovercraft games. The MVP for both games included some basic infantry, specifically riflemen and others with shoulder-fired rocket launchers. I was set to do a full design and development workup for both games, despite these infantry being functionally identical except for how effective they would be against the player. The FPS rifleman would be a primary FPS threat, capable of killing the player pretty easily, while he wouldn’t do much to an armored hovercraft. Our rocket infantry, however, would absolutely obliterate the FPS player (making it a wasted shot, really), while being pretty dangerous to the hovercraft since he has anti-armor missiles in his launcher. On paper, you’d want to handle the two scales differently to allow for the detail of a single person in the FPS rather than only needing a much more coarse handling for the hovercraft game. With a computer doing the heavy lifting, detail isn’t that much of an issue; even running at 60 fps lets it do a lot under the hood without being a major pain.
Instead of spending a lot of time and effort reinventing the wheel a few times, I shifted gears to a unified damage system. It’s something I’ve had on the back back burner for a long time, but I decided to pull the pin on it. It features a set of universal protocols for damage and how it’s handled by various targets, allowing me to make things universal with a few minor code tweaks.
In the example of the infantrymen, the major difference in how damage is handled is actually nonexistent — the hovercraft simply has much thicker armor and is much more durable overall than the player (or infantry), so weapons do a lot less to it. The automatic rifle bullets hit just as hard in both games, it’s just that the hovercraft has a thick layer of rigid armor instead of a Kevlar vest. Same with the rocket obliterating a human but merely inflicting serious damage to the hovercraft. It also lets us do a reenactment of the semi scene in The Dark Knight.
Hovercraft Racing
This one went a lot quicker than I’d anticipated. I was dreading having to make racetracks from scratch, simply because to make it look even remotely decent you need a pile of assets. Track surfaces, the grass next to the track, pit road, stands, sponsor signs, fences, all that stuff. Honestly, if it had been up to me I’d probably have taken a terrain, put a grass texture on it, slapped down some black rectangular and triangular sections to represent the track surface, added a brick wall (basic rectangles with brick texture on them) around the track, and called it a day.
However, I threw some cash at the Support Ukraine Mega Asset Pack in the Unity Store just on general principle and it happened to come with a racetrack generator. Install, push a few buttons, and you have a procedurally-generated track. Righteous. So instead of spending a chunk making terrible-looking LOD A track assets, I got to jump right into coding the AI for the other racing hovercraft.
When you play this one, my advice is slow down. The player hovercraft will still flip like a bottlecap if you let it, and I managed to do so on every track I tested.
When all was said and done, though, I decided the combative version was a much more interesting project and will be devoting my time to it instead of the racing game unless someone persuades me otherwise.
Rokkit Precision
I added a few more levels, as planned, and (as with the hovercraft racing game) decided the combative version was a more interesting project.
Web
Upgrades were made to all the sideline sites and three client sites (one existing, two new). A fourth client site is on hold because they’re playing games, so I’m not about to call that a failure on my part.
“Liberal Arts Electives”
I completed all of the lectures and incorporated what I could into my daily routine.
Going forward this summer I’ll be focusing on a lot more of the “phy ed” side of this because it’s summer and I can get out to the trails without them being mud pits. I may also hit the disc golf course near the trails if for no other reason than to see just what in tarnation a frisbee golf pro shop looks like. All of this, naturally, depends on my doctors’ orders. They want me taking it easy for the time being, and I’m specifically not allowed in the pool until things heal. I’m pretty sure I’m not even allowed anywhere near the pool just on general principle.
Overall, I can’t complain too much about how this went. Considering I was effectively a full-time student working a full-time job with overtime in a machine shop, and working on our sideline business, then had a major medical malfunction, I’d consider this a solid achievement.