domiek
patreon
Dev Talk - Personal Trainer RE Progress
🕑 Added 2023-10-08 13:26:34 +0000 UTCLots of progress and changes to report this time around. It's a nice change of pace from the prior monotonous vague "continued coding" reports.
Coding:
The rewrite is essentially complete. At this point, the last version of PT is completely playable with the new code base. I initially spent a few weeks creating new classes and functions to not only be able to implement new features, but to keep things as clean, robust and bug-free as possible. Along the way, I had discovered I would require creating further new functions to tackle unforeseen problems.
As of now, the new code is able to handle both static and random events with game progress in mind based on various conditions. This was important in order to create a sense of corruption progress with not only the main girls but also the miscellaneous characters throughout the game.
EEVEE:
Converting shaders from Cycles to EEVEE was an unknown for me. I was aware that there is a lot of common foundation between both render engines but wasn't aware of just how similar the shader setup was. I was able to convert all of the main characters and the miscellaneous characters quickly, which comes out to 24 characters. I've also converted half of the environments. This process is a bit tedious but overall a lot better than I expected.
I've also begun rendering new scenes. EEVEE is similar to Unreal Engine in terms of real-time rendering. It's been a treat to work in real-time.
Organization:
Having to go back to working on a sandbox game like PT, combined with the monstrosity that is the confusing nonsensical spaghetti code and non-linear work made me realize just how badly I needed a new organization system. I'd previously use a combination of Google sheets, sticky notes and the code editor to keep track of things. It worked out okayyy but I noticed that I wasted a lot of time thinking and prioritizing what to do next due to the scattered nature of this setup.
Now I use Obsidian with a Kanban extension, synced across all of my devices. Holy shit did I not realize how much time I wasted on being so scattered brain until I implemented such a simple system.
I have a board for tasks and a separate ones for bug tracking. While implementing one thing, it's not uncommon to realize that something else also needs to be done or run into a bug. Now I can quickly toss it on the board and continue where I left off. It also makes distractions much easier to manage as I don't have to try to mentally keep track of what I was doing.
I was wondering how much actual time I was spending on actively working and started using a timer that I would pause the moment I was doing anything other than actively working. The results shocked me. After implementing this new organization method, combined with some other focused session and minimizing distraction implementations, my time tracked production has doubled over the past week. And this doesn't even take into account that the efficiency of the work itself has also drastically increased.
You know you're getting old when you start getting excited and nerding out about organization systems.
Update When?:
There's still quiet a lot of work to do, but I'm currently projecting to have a Patreon release before December, possibly earlier. Since I've rewritten the entire code from scratch, I'd like to do a Patreon release before Steam so that the new code can really be tested by as many people as possible. It would also give me time to work on implementing the Steam specific code in the meantime.
Don't forget to wishlist PT on Steam, it will really help me out.
Thanks,
Dom
