So, I have been working for about 15 hours today. Moved almost all the Daikon Forge UI I had made, over to the new Unity UI that is coming in Unity 4.6. I am fine with using the beta version of that particular system, since I will not be releasing any time soon. Moving the UI over to the native Unity UI, did simplify a few things and solved various problems actually. It has all the features I need, and it uses the native Unity features for posting events and animating the components, so all in all it should perform better to.
The game mechanics features are growing to be very mature at this point, and it has only taken me 5 months to get to that point. 5 months of graphics work, design programming, Unit Tests, developing programming sandboxes, editor plug-ins, high level programming UI and shit loads of hours. Just so that the player can solve the puzzles with proper tools. But, 2 of those months I could only devote about half the week on my game since I had been working as a contractor also.
Having proper solutions running at the core does give you a lot of options and lot of security when you are creating more of the features. Also, when I am creating the environments and puzzles, I will adapt to the mechanics and UI so that all the parts work better with the whole and make the UI fit better with whatever I drop in the world.
I have been doing this for 11 months now, and I think it is quite clear that I am not a person that gives up easily. I will be at this for the next 2 years I believe, and in that time, things will only improve. There will be weeks where I will mass produce content and make interesting things within silly time frames, there will also be times where I will become less productive and slow down considerably, but I will never quit. I have not quit any of my hobbies since I was a child. I have been drawing since I was a infant, playing the guitar and drums since I was 15, programming since I was 20 and playing games since the days of the NES. This will get played to the end, and the results will be interesting.
When I was creating all these plans for the grant application, I created a production schedule to follow and plans to create special testing environments so that I could share the game with friends and interested parties without having to give them the whole game. Basically, just a testing level with all the various types of puzzles I come up with, where all the variety can be played with, without spoiling the actual game. And according to that plan, that is supposed to happen next February.
5 months of work for the core game mechanics, and still a couple of months to go for the cleanup and rest before I actually start working on producing levels and playable results.
Right now, my mind is a bit buzzed from all the coffee and work I have consumed throughout the day. I should be packing up soon and heading home to relax a bit.
V 