079 - The Tooling Saga

August 9, 2020

I spent much of the last couple of weeks trying to figure out my path forwards with Akigi.

I was making progress, but not quickly enough.

What I came to was that I needed to have a vision for the game in order to gain the direction needed to start landing larger game play additions.

A sentence to guide me while determining what to work on. One that I could refer back to when figuring out whether or not something fit into the game.

After ironing that out a bit, I spent time thinking through how to proceed.

What I landed on was that my current pace of game play development was far too slow.

Anything short of one large new game play addition per week would mean that I could not release the game anytime soon.

I needed to increase my pace by an order of magnitude or more.

My solution to this is to use August to invest heavily in my tooling.

Beef up the game editor to make it easier to add new game play and world entities. Beef up our asset pipeline to enable hot re-loading.

Things of that nature.

I'm diving in.

Other Notes / Progress

  • Fixed the holes between terrain chunks when rendering terrain in the Metal 3D API.

  • Added the ability to render solid colored UI quads. I could previously only render textured quads. I plan to use the solid quads in the game editor.

  • Split out more user interface related functionality into the user-interface workspace crate.

  • Fixed text rendering in the game editor and slightly optimized it by cutting the texture memory used down by a factor of 4.

Next Week

The goal for this week is to add the ability to place scenery within the game editor.


Cya next time!

- CFN