Sunday, 7 May 2023

Home sweet home.

The last four weeks did not go how I wanted. One simple thought of using https://www.mixamo.com/ as a source of test animations started a chain of decisions that lead to my downfall or maybe something greater in the long run (Spoiler alert: I'm still not able to use the animation from the database). It got even worse, I did not even spend any time o the animation which did not move the gameplay a lot.

So probably you are curious about what I was working on this time. The answer is pretty simple:


I created a lot of content which led me to tinker around with Twinsen House: 



This like always did not when smoothly at first. The whole idea of using https://www.mixamo.com/ for animations lead me to a bigger change in the way how I interact with content. Small impact on the content creation itself but more than two weeks of iterating on code. In the longer perspective best decision ever.

After that, I got annoyed by the long loading times in the tool. So I looked into it, improved it, and broke a lot of my content. The majority of the locations look like that:


Missing materials on all the objects. Which is once again fine as I finally cleaned up some code that I wanted to touch long ago. With improvement in other content tools recreating this data is only a question of time. 

There is also this weekend which I could spend on the animation system but decided that I really need to do something about my icon generation. A small thing where while icons generating editor sometimes freezes. Already been resolved, still not part of the main codebase but getting there.  

Generally against all the odds pretty nice few weeks. But the goodies do not end here. 

2.21

This week we got from 2.21:

Which is an interesting dive into the process of creating the original game. I was specifically entertained by the large nose Quetches :) they look funny. I also would love the idea of giants being used in further games. This is a pretty cool idea even if the technical part of it would be a nightmare.  

For this who missed it, there is also a previous one: 

I mentioned this because while doing content I finally had time to think a little bit: 

Who Twinsen really is?

This a simple question, which bothered me a lot. Think about it, what do we really know about Twinsen? 
  • He is a guy who was put in prison for having weird dreams. 
  • He has a girlfriend Zoe.
  • In the second game, we learned that they have a kid. 
  • Their house in the first game has a freaking secret cave full of ancient stuff. 
  • In his wardrobe, he has a magical robe.
These past weeks allow me to explore this topic a little bit more and I think that I finally have an answer: 

For now, I will stop here as I still want you to have fun exploring the universe of Tribute. Leaving some mystery. 

But to make it more interesting I would like to hear your theories: 

Who do you think Twinsen really is?