I had single active task on my list ...

Last week we can count as a productive one. There was a new post and soon after that, I managed to finish the last part of the work related to visual scripting. Finishing something is always a piece of great news. To celebrate it there was an extra update on our Discord:

With that, I finally could return back to the animations. Recovering this single system would bring us back on track with work on the L.B.A. Tribute. We were excited by this perspective as it was too long from the last time we worked on it. 

This negligence showed up pretty quickly. Broken animated characters popped up on our screen. If we had a working game this would probably not happen, as you can see below it is hard to miss it :]

Sadly we do not have it right now and because of that, we missed it. This mistake cost us only three days (if you are interested in details check this thread). From the positive stuff, while working on it we discovered some other issues which potentially could be also hard to track. Now things looked good.

It was once again time to finally work on the animation system. I started doing some prep work, till I realized that the world editor emits errors that I do not see in the tools logger.  This is rather a game-breaker. You never want a case where something goes wrong and you do not know about it.

This rather long and boring story brought us to today. Logging is almost done but cost us a few extra days of work. The results are not bad even if some stuffs were left as to-do to save some time.

The whole situation feels a little bit like: 

Just for me, it feels like "I have a single active task on my list. Started working on it, and now I have ten active tasks on me." But with logging out of the way I can now return back to prep work on animations and with this, soon we may return back to working on the game. Hold crossed fingers for that, I need mine to continue to work on our little adventure. 

Dark places.

Another time full of challenges behind us. The biggest one would be my head 😓Over the years I had a lot of discussions about how over-ambitious I am. One of my friends describes it: 

"Creating the game in Unity or Unreal is hard. Then I tell people that I released a game on my engine, and they look at me as if I'm insane. Then there is this guy [me]."

The thing is that we do not really create a game with its specialized engine. Our goal is to create a game technology that will allow us to make Tribute and further productions, whatever they would be. This type of approach is hard.  It challenges our skills, pushes them to the limit, and opens doors that never would open otherwise. At the same time, there is the price that we need to pay for this approach. Long development cycle, multiple iterations on systems that do not fit design. We could of course try to clone what other engines do but this is not our way. We like to explore, feel creative freedom, and just do what we want to do. 

All of this sounds great, except anyone who works on long-lasting projects knows that with time comes fatigue. When I started working on the project 14 years ago everything was simple I wanted to make L.B.A. remake. Now things getting complicated, I'm a lot older, and have a job, responsibilities, and family. Even things with L.B.A. got more complicated, we have an official remake and a whole team working on it. Where there are only two of us working on Tribute and we are still stuck on technology. All of these things lead to doubts if the path I chose was right? Was restarting the project some ago really smart? Would it not be easier to give up ...?

When this happens it is hard. Doubts grow in our minds and bring us to dark places which stop us from seeing positive things. The thing is, that there is a lot to see. We still may not be close to finishing the L.B.A. Tribute but whole tools grow with every week, they become more stable and just look awesome.

Editor use for creation L.B.A.:Tribute

Twinsen House (Editor view)

Script editor with a visual selection of translated text.

The same thing with the official remake, I'm sure that what they do is something really cool. But what we can do is take a whole story for a spin and retell it in our own unique way. How this will go we will see but I think this will be something awesome.

What do all of you think about this whole thing?