Polishing, bushes, longscreen!


For Christmas I got a stand that lets me turn my widescreen monitor to a vertical orientation. I have just one thing to say, that is, longscreen is long. It's pretty weird but you better believe it's awesome for reading the internet. Never could adjust to coding/internetting on widescreen, but longscreen I think I can get used to. Seriously, it's ridiculously long.How to polish a game? As you play you have to notice what's missing. For example, "there's no sound effect when I step on this", "the bush seems... dead", "I wish there were a bit of fauna around, birds and bunnies etc.", and so on including of course bugs. If you tackle these things as you run across them, you'll never get anywhere though because by the time you fix one thing you'll have forgotten everything else. So you need a TO DO list system. I use TADA List which is from a great internet company 37signals. It's just so darn simple.Then you just relentlessly tackle things on your TO DO list, without fearing to add to it. It will get gargantuan, because polishing a game is about fixing a million tiny things. But that's how it gets done, as far as I can see. Don't think, just fix!So yes, "bushes seem... dead". I want to make so that when you walk into a bush, it shakes a bit. There are other related features that could go with this, like a tree could sway in the wind, etc., but I'm not sure the best way to implement it yet.My current idea is to add a method to the object interface that takes a motion vector. This could be used for a lot of things. Most objects wouldn't pay attention, but for trees it could be used to create sway by a simple wind simulation, and for bushes could be used as the player walks through them.This approach seems a logical place to start, it seems a bit too "physics simulation-y" for my liking but it's not extremely complex. I guess the complexity is not so much in the interface but in the resulting animation/etc., which needn't be too bad.

2009-01-10


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