Funemployment Weeks 15 and 16

Time is a flat circle.

I literally didn't realise that another two weeks had passed since my last post. I legitimately believed this was going to be the first time in ages that I managed to do a weekly update. Ah well.

On the Hooligans front not a lot has changed besides some minor cosmetic updates. The reason for this is that within the past 2 weeks we decided to start looking at a different engine for it.

I love GameMaker with my heart and soul, but it isn't exactly industry standard, and it isn't exactly alone in being an accessible tool for people to start making games with. In a lot of ways it's limited, and in some ways, it's downright backwards. I didn't realise this until my team mate and I were discussing how he could help out coding some of the project, but that would require him buying GameMaker outright (as far as we can tell).

Whereas with Unreal or Unity he could download it for free and start working away. Plus looking at the results people get in something like Unity versus what you get with GameMaker, it was starting to become abundantly clear that not-GameMaker was the way forward. And switching to a more industry standard engine would also help my prospects with future potential job hunting.

So a bunch of the past week has been that - learning Unity. I was hesitant at first because the last time I tried Unity it wasn't the most welcoming program. But since then, it seems that a lot more work has gone into onboarding new users. The Learning section, the example projects and the step by step tutorials have all been incredibly useful in making me feel like Unity is something I could legitimately use for all my future development needs.

The Pixelles program continues and I need to create a cinematic. I feel this might come a bit more naturally to me than the previous tasks just because I've spent time screenwriting before and have studied it somewhat.

I also put a bit of time into my robot prototype. A small change that I made is to the first environment hazard which is meant to be an unstable generator that blasts electric energy at set intervals. There's something off about how the game feels so far, and I can't quite put my finger on it. In theory I should be able to start chugging away at developing this prototype further, but something is mentally blocking me. I'll look into it when I have time but it is like the third or fourth thing on my priority list currently.

Lastly I finally finished up writing my critique of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order​. I found it hard to write this one up for some reason. I wanted to avoid making another 10 minute video, but then found myself struggling to fit in all the things I wanted to say in less time than that. 

In the end I decided to have the video centre on my main criticism (the combat), and just make small mentions of everything else (since everything else was basically fine). I'll polish up the writing tomorrow, then start the really fun process of voice over, and making the actual video. Woo.

Oh I also played Celeste and Gone Home in the last week, so if I keep this pace up I'll be able to get through my entire Epic Game Store backlog by about 2045.