[ game-design red-rover frustration ]

Progress Resupply

So that’s a month then, is it. Strangely, Red Rover is not yet finished.

Work has been steady, if less than glamourous. At first, there was about a week of trying out new IDEs (I claim that MonoDevelop, faults aside, has probably the best autocomplete ever) and attempting to get a 64-bit Linux distro to compile 32-bit dependencies for a 32-bit OGRE library – with a few days to give up and just install a 32-bit Ubuntu on the laptop (and come up against the same linker problems regardless); a week or so of trying out physics engines – I desperately wanted to use Newton (for obvious reasons), but Bullet turned out to be a bit more mature and actively maintained (and more easily integrated with OGRE); a week of re-familiarising myself with Blender for eventual content creation (I swear, I’ve learnt the tool around five times already – at least now I have a longer-term reason to stick with it); &c &c &c.

In short, it’s been yet another sequence of black triangles commingled with the shaking of fists at the majority of things.

Otherwise, KO_OP business is moving along briskly. Saleem is essentially constantly engaged with bankers and bureaucrats, and/or sweeping cat hair (note to self: Disney movie/game tie-in called Bureau-Cats, digitised Tony Jay voice as Cats); Bronson has been cutting his teeth on Pure Data and Unity; and we’ve had a number of artists hanging out in the office and producing some fantastic concept and promotional art (more on that in The Future).

So while the tasks are a bit mundane, this is still the first “steady” “job” I’ve held down with like-minded people. That’s motivating in its own right, and the fact that I’m seeing progress on the ground (however low-level) is the gravy on top of the cherry on top.