New Year Update
Alright, let's get down to brass tacks. My last post was back in September, and not-so-coincidentally that was a few days after I started working full time. Initially, I said my working schedule would leave me with plenty of off time to devote to my own projects. While that's still mostly true, I have to be a bit more mindful of how I allocate my time. And this has become more complicated once overtime started eating into my project time. Let's face it, I actually get paid at work so I don't mind picking up a shift or two. However, due to a scheduling disaster, I ended up working every night for almost two weeks straight at the end of November and haven't gone a week without working extra shifts since then. My project time was nonexistent during those two weeks, which sucked, but now that I'm finally out of the worst of it, I'm antsy to get back into the saddle. So let's talk about where we're at and how we're going to move forward.
First and foremost: ARventure. I know without these blog posts you've basically been in the dark on what's up. The good news is that I have been making good headway on the quest system! It's still not fully there yet, but the individual pieces are coming along well. So far, I've got the in-game display/UI for quests just about set, along with the basic skeleton of how the quests themselves function. I still need to work on showing quest markers on the map and the data structure for quests to be saved/loaded needs to be finalized, but the progress so far is encouraging. After all that is said and done, it's just a matter of connecting the pieces. Everything's coming up Milhouse! Or so it would seem...
Unfortunately, there's some bad news on the ARventure front. Last week, I received a notification that Mapzen, the service that I use for the map data in the game, is shutting down. The map display was the one part of the game that I felt was in a good place. Sure, it needed some refining in the aesthetic department, but it worked. Losing Mapzen is quite a blow to the project, even knowing that this is the price I pay for relying on free services. So where do we go from here? Obviously I'll need to find a new source of map data. Thankfully, I did my due diligence when setting up the map rendering system, so switching over should only be a minor inconvenience compared to picking out a new service to use. That said, however, I don't plan to jump into that immediately.
Starting today, I plan to step away from ARventure to work on my "Master Plan" that I had mentioned a while back. I know what you're thinking, but fret not, this is not a long term project. I've scoped it down quite a bit and my goal will be to have the project complete by May. I don't expect it will actually take all that time to complete, but I want to budget myself enough time to make sure I can meet my deadline, especially if work tries to get in my way. We'll go over the project in more detail once things get rolling in January. Ultimately, my goal is to actually complete and release something in a relatively short timespan. Sort of a trial run for future endeavors. After that, we'll see what the future holds for projects like ARventure, if(adventure), and some smaller ideas I'd like to move forward with at some point.
Now that just leaves the blog. As I've said in the past, I will only post when there's something worth posting about. With my limited free time, I'm going to focus more on actually working on projects, and not bother posting about every little thing I finish. As such, the blog will be pretty barren, with posts only coming in to document major milestones. And with that, I'll see you again once I've made some headway on my new project.
First and foremost: ARventure. I know without these blog posts you've basically been in the dark on what's up. The good news is that I have been making good headway on the quest system! It's still not fully there yet, but the individual pieces are coming along well. So far, I've got the in-game display/UI for quests just about set, along with the basic skeleton of how the quests themselves function. I still need to work on showing quest markers on the map and the data structure for quests to be saved/loaded needs to be finalized, but the progress so far is encouraging. After all that is said and done, it's just a matter of connecting the pieces. Everything's coming up Milhouse! Or so it would seem...
Unfortunately, there's some bad news on the ARventure front. Last week, I received a notification that Mapzen, the service that I use for the map data in the game, is shutting down. The map display was the one part of the game that I felt was in a good place. Sure, it needed some refining in the aesthetic department, but it worked. Losing Mapzen is quite a blow to the project, even knowing that this is the price I pay for relying on free services. So where do we go from here? Obviously I'll need to find a new source of map data. Thankfully, I did my due diligence when setting up the map rendering system, so switching over should only be a minor inconvenience compared to picking out a new service to use. That said, however, I don't plan to jump into that immediately.
Starting today, I plan to step away from ARventure to work on my "Master Plan" that I had mentioned a while back. I know what you're thinking, but fret not, this is not a long term project. I've scoped it down quite a bit and my goal will be to have the project complete by May. I don't expect it will actually take all that time to complete, but I want to budget myself enough time to make sure I can meet my deadline, especially if work tries to get in my way. We'll go over the project in more detail once things get rolling in January. Ultimately, my goal is to actually complete and release something in a relatively short timespan. Sort of a trial run for future endeavors. After that, we'll see what the future holds for projects like ARventure, if(adventure), and some smaller ideas I'd like to move forward with at some point.
Now that just leaves the blog. As I've said in the past, I will only post when there's something worth posting about. With my limited free time, I'm going to focus more on actually working on projects, and not bother posting about every little thing I finish. As such, the blog will be pretty barren, with posts only coming in to document major milestones. And with that, I'll see you again once I've made some headway on my new project.