Well, the second month has been an interesting one, and mostly just working on my game project and not doing too much studying.
What I was aiming for in the second month, was to basically have a prototype of sorts and maybe have it in a state that could be shared with people in some fashion. But take note that I will not be strung out in to a stressful situation just to keep a deadline for some inquisitive souls. Anyone that is curious will just have to wait until I SAY that it is ready for feedback and some sort of input from others. That plan did fall a bit short, since I am still working on that.
In last 4 weeks, I have thrown out the initial prototype and actually found an interesting game hook that I am excited about diving into. Have gotten most of the game mechanics in place, but have been focusing on visuals and UI work for the last week or so. I did put most of the UI stuff on hold since I did not want to get lost in texture work before I knew what needed to go into it.
I did look into some Photoshop tutorials on the gnomon library to be sure that I was not getting lost in some bad photoshop habits and knowing all the tools that are available. My particular workflow for creating icons and images is basically creating any geometric shape that needs to go into it in Maya, move the model into ZBrush for touchup and scultping if it needs more organic touch up, then export that image into Photoshop for masking and colors. Using the UI library that I bought from the Unity Asset store also gave me a little bit of an introduction of creating bitmap fonts and using utilities for creating those such as BMFont. Another item that I am quite new to, is creating effects in Unity, and at some point will have to tackle that to be able to create some visual candy, such as line effects(lazors) and particle effects.
There are still about two weeks remaining of this year and I am hoping that I will have reached a minor milestone of having a small playable demo by then. Will I put it up on the web just because Unity has a web player to allow that? We will see.
After the new year and going forward, I am basically aiming to wrap up all the base mechanics and features within the first month, so that I can start spitting out levels and game content like a mad man. When I am at a point where I am basically just producing content and puzzles for this thing and all the items have been created, I will start to look at the networking and business side of things.
Within a couple of months, when I have touched every aspect of the game creation pipeline in a way where I am bursting with confidence, creating prototypes will be like drinking water and I will be able to churn out things faster than would seem natural.
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