A brief history since Saturday, May 28, 2016

Wow..

I had totally forgotten that my last post here had been Saturday, May 28, 2016.

This reminded me of why I stopped updating, and made me realize my last post left a lot of things out.

So a brief history to catch this blog up.


My kickstarter for Rise of Dagon failed and  I continued for a short time to try and complete ROD by myself.  I eventually came to the estimate that I would both have to cut the features fairly dramatically (due to lack of funding) AND it would take a minimum of 2 more years.  But as I thought about it - in all honestly - it would probably longer because we are all natively bad at estimating how long things will take

Eventually with that sobering realization I had to admit to myself I would almost certainly have to give up- I just couldn't see how I was going to finish the game.

So I decided to take the architecture of Rise of Dagon and make another game.

ROD was an  Eye of the Beholder / Legend of Grimrock style game. Which is to say turn based, grid movement, party based , first person RPG.

So if I took those ingredients and mixed them up - such as take out a party based, first person, RPG and made it a Rogue-like instead I would much closer to finishing a game (I thought).

In fact a big win is I would not need to finish my level editor nor hand craft a dozen levels or so.

Instead I needed to write a procedural dungeon algorithm using my level format.

So that's the first thing I did in my new spin-off project "Chocolate Pants the Unicorn", CP for short.

The procedural dungeon generation first pass took a fairly short time and I spent the next year getting the project to a fairly decent state.

The first 3 levels were in place and I had it up on early access on itch.io but then two things happened.

Firstly my father died, and secondly I changed jobs.

Both of those events are what we call 'life events' and cause a lot of stress and change and both of them require time to settle down and re-adjust.

I was not overly close to my father, but his passing was upsetting. It did effect my motivation and drive - but perhaps not to the level of depression. 

It was just enough that I had to focus on my job - instead of gamedev to keep myself on track.

So I struggled for 3 or 4 months of no updates on my CP project before I gave up on that too.

And now we are almost caught up!

About 18 months after that the only project I have finished is a co-project with a friend called Make America Glow Again on iOS and Android.

I have tried to start MANY very small projects - hoping to find something VERY small that I could finish myself but nothing was motivating enough to return to.

So here I am , rebooting Chocolate Pants the Unicorn!

A long painful pause, and rebooting a long dead project.

It's been a long time since I've updated this and a lot has happened. I could probably write a book on it - but no one would want to read it so let's skip that.

What does matter to a passing game developer who might stumble on this is that after about 18 months of time I have started trying to reboot my Chocolate Pants the Unicorn Roguelike project.

I first attempted the reboot about 4 months ago; when I did one of my largest pain points was that the developer of Particle Playground (upon which I relied upon 100% for my particles) had cancelled support for the product due to Unity rewriting the particle systems.

I had to choose to stay on the old Unity 5 and the last published version of Particle Playground or update to Unity 2019 and get on a modern platform and see how things looked.

So as painful as it was I decided that upgrading was really the only honest way forwards - the chance that I'd get blocked by a show-stopper on a 2 year old version of Unity was medium to high risk and I didn't want to get back into the project to find myself stuck again.

So I spent around 10 days trying to upgrade the project - most of the was broken code due to the inability to compile my scripts because of breaking Unity changes.

After 10 days of effort my project compiled BUT I now had the famous problem that haunt Unity which is when you get compilation errors in a class it often breaks the serialization of the prefab in the editor.

What this means is somewhere around half of my prefabs were completely broken and the entire game was filled with countless null pointer errors.

I went ahead and quit trying to relaunch at that point, I just couldn't handle wrapping my head around it.

Four months later - I finally realized that nothing is inspiring to me about the dozens of "small" projects that I've tried to launch in the interim - and all I think about coding is RPG/Roguelike style games.

In other words - I needed to dig back into this or start a new project.

So here I am - relaunching Chocolate Pants the Unicorn - and I have the first screenshot of a completely broken level to share .. but hey at least its loading now!

Lets see where this goes!