First, to get it out of the way, I finished Vengeful Gods and made it available on Itch. It’s more of a good luck charm than a traditional game, but if you’ve had one of those days or weeks, you know it’s nice to have something you can do to maybe change your fate. So check it out!
Now on to the topic at hand. I’m trashing Pompeii and starting over from scratch after about a month. And I’m doing it on purpose.
Yes, I know you’re supposed to prototype a game with stand-in objects and half-assed graphics to be sure the game is fun. You’re not supposed to spend a ton of time on the environment until you know you want to develop the game itself.
I’m choosing to ignore that advice for a number of reasons:
- The environment itself is critical to gameplay. I need to get a feel for things like how many shops will you find on a typical street, and how far away is the harbor from the forum?
- The point of the project is, in part, education. Thus, even the environment itself is the project, without any game attached to it.
- Doing this is driving me to learn many new skills, and improve efficiency in others, which in itself is a useful outcome. Often the advice about prototyping is to avoid the pitfall of just falling back and doing stuff you enjoy. Working on rebuilding the city is actually pushing me the other direction.
This leads me to the learning. Hooboy. As I posted recently on Mastodon, my next steps required Sufficient Brain, but the temperature this week has exceeded the Brain Suppression Threshold. Plus, I’d already used up my Strategic Brain Reserve.
Since I started the Pompeii reconstruction project, I started learning about Blender. Like, how to move the default cube or look at the other side of it. That’s the level of Blender I was learning. Now I’m creating meshes, doing UV unwraps, adjusting texturing with images, and exporting variations for use in Unity. And I am not a visual arts kind of person, so 3D modeling and texturing was a huge drain. I would now say that Blender is, in a sense, “not for me.” However, I can use it to do quite a few useful things that I couldn’t do before. Choosing to rebuild Pompeii yet again will push me to make it all my own assets (or pretty darned close), at least for the built environment.
Related to this, I have picked up more skills in Photoshop, Gimp, and even learned a little about photogrammetry in service of the texturing and making of 3D meshes. (Not to mention tidbits of archaeology and geology as I answered questions like, “If they were repaving the forum and switching from tuff to travertine when Vesuvius erupted, are those close enough to the same color that I could use the same texture, and does it really matter…?”)
I learned about new sources for finding free textures, and more about plain image textures vs. normal and texture maps (though I’m still a neophyte in that area).
I also picked up and learned how to use my own assets in Auto Fence & Wall Builder by Two-Click Tools. Having figured out some refinements to my first attempts, I’ll be able to use it more like a tool and less like an experiment, which will increase my building efficiency.
Related to that, but not exactly “learning” in the same sense, I now have a better idea of a lot of things, such as what information is available about Pompeii, and what balance I’m comfortable with between historical accuracy and game-like oversimplification, and that I want to use Arabic numbers for organizing my hierarchy rather than Roman numerals. (I’ll still stick with Latin for the named prefabs, though.) This, too, will decrease the messiness of the city, and given how big “city” is as a project, that’s important. I’ll model important buildings as their own thing, and miscellaneous blocks of shops and homes with more randomness and abstraction.
Lastly, I learned more about Git. Something went wrong and the Pompeii scene I’d been working on appeared blank. I was aided by other devs on Mastodon to convert previously invisible-to-me dangling blobs into a recovered commit in a new fork with git, but as one of my cousins observed, that sounded like I was maybe having a stroke. After more investigation, it looked like maybe the project hadn’t been set up 100% correctly and my gitignore wasn’t ignoring everything I thought it was and more little problems cropped up.
With all of that being new since I started building Pompeii, I think I can pull Bionic Man: I can rebuild it. I have the technology. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.
And that is why I am choosing to scrap my work of the last month, ignore conventional wisdom regarding prototyping, and starting with a fresh project.