"If you start out slow, your body has a chance to settle into the race, and you can keep up your pace for much longer."
Well, this is it! The first day of full time development on Before. I'm so excited to see what this is going to be like!
Earlier this year I ran my first half-marathon. One of the most important lessons is that when you start it's really important that you run way slower than you think you should. Your full of energy and adrenaline and everything in you just wants to sprint, but if you do you'll run out of energy really quickly and be lucky to even finish the race at all. Whereas if you start out slow, your body has a chance to settle into the race, and you can keep up your pace for much longer. So that's what I'm doing this week - starting out slow.
I do have some ideas of what I want to achieve this week of course. I've got some business stuff to deal with, including setting up the tax and accounting side of things now that I'm going from doing this as a hobby to doing it as a job. I've also got a metric bucketload of links in a "When I have time" folder to sort through and start researching :)
On the game, the main thing I'm going to look at is putting an end to it. At the moment, the game demo consists of a longish tutorial. Once you've go through that, there's nothing much more to do, so rather than just let the player drift off into the sunset, I'm going to put in a wee end screen, and build a simple leaderboard of completion time. I'm thinking that leaderboards are possibly wrong for this game - they encourage speed and competition, which is not what I'm going for, but for these early stages I'm hoping it'll give people trying the game something to aim for.
Final thing is something that I've been wanting to try for ages but never had time and head space for. Currently, the planet is split up into slightly irregularly shaped 5, 6 and 7 sided tiles. This looks kinda cool - a bit more natural perhaps - but I want to try changing the tiling to being (almost) all regularly shaped 6 sided tiles. The main reason is that with the irregular tiles, buildings that take up more than 1 tile will be really tricky, whereas if I can get things more regular and predictable I should be able to add larger buildings, which will add a lot to the game.
Right, so it looks like I'll be doing quite a lot after all!
Wish me luck!
