This week we did plenty of work (4 extra hours on top of our standard one hour a day), but for me, most of it was not stuff I’d planned to do. I’d hoped to finish the basic roster of 3D assets for the game’s main hub town, and model, rig, and animate another enemy. Instead I spent most of this week helping test a set of instructions that Merrix wrote for me to follow when importing new enemies into the game.
While I didn’t get to finish the tasks I’d originally set, it was still a really rewarding week, partly because those instructions Merrix wrote were a success – the Jackalope now exists in the Godot project, and can fight the player character. (I actually wound up dying to a crowd of jackalopes in testing. That was fun – genuinely, I love that little creature.) And I got him in there, which is kind of remarkable considering I know less than nothing about Godot or GDscript.
(An aside: Is this what the person in Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment would feel like? Because…even if I’m just following a rulebook at this point, I feel pretty proud that I was able to get the Jackalope working. And I’m starting to feel a little more comfortable editing things in our project.)
Merrix poured a lot of hours into the instructions, and we both think it’s worth it. It’ll mean that I can take on a little more of the in-engine work that has previously fallen exclusively to Merrix. And hopefully, I’ll also be able to test new enemies and creatures myself right away, not wait for Merrix to import them and give me feedback.
So, while it took both of us most of a week, I think it’s worth it to have me be able to import, modify, and test the characters and creatures I design, myself. I’m a bit proud of myself, and really appreciative of Merrix’s patience – but also very ready to get back to our regularly scheduled game development.
Thanks for following along!
-Peri