So, this week’s devlog comes to you a day late. My sincerest apologies.

Firstly, I must be frank and say that this week’s progress has perhaps not been as productive as I might have hoped. A phrase that I’m sure is common amongst game developers but really shouldn’t be. If you follow my game development efforts on Twitter, you might have seen the following image floating around the internet:
 
So that’s the demo level you’re looking at right now, and it’s a bit worse for wear. In fixing the tiling and co-ordinate issues that made building neat environments difficult, each of the wall pieces moved up and to the left. Creating big ugly gaps and generally spoiling things. One half of this week has been me recovering from the fact that I’m going to have to re-make all the assets currently present in the game (and then some), and the other half was spent planning and making various assets.

Concept art was drawn up, along with various mock-ups and much time was spent going back and forth between Unity and Blender, trying to come up with some kind of new design for the lantern:
 
As you can see, I went through and took elements from many different lanterns I found online, and this is perhaps the furthest I got with it:
 
 
As you can see, I have gone with this unique, ceramic vase shape after much experimenting, and I hope to have the finished result available soon. Though one wonders if this was time well spent, as not a single line of code was written this week.

I’m starting to feel a little bit of pressure with this whole thing, I won’t lie. People are still trying out the demo and enjoying it, which is wonderful. It makes me happy that you all seem to be on board for the full game, but at the same time the previously mentioned problem in the assets pipeline means that I can’t roll out the patch I had planned sometime around last Tuesday or so. You know that bit in films where the villain meets the hero for the second time and says, ‘I should have killed you when I had the chance’? I’m feeling a similar sort of regret, only sans murder, and with more technological incompetence.

Personal matters and my own laziness always seem to find a way to pry me away from my work, but I digress. I didn’t intend for things to get so personal. Don’t worry about it. Overall, I’m fine. Every time that I write one of these, it’s a chance to improve for the future. Always look on the bright side of life and all that.

I guess my major failing last week was not setting concrete goals for myself and sticking to them. And this week, I feel like programming. Yes… that sounds like a good idea.

Until next time...