CODE-FILM-15 years is a flash

Much of the work I've done the past 4 years has gone unseen by all but my family and irl friends- I have had a game project that I haven't shown much of outside of this teaser trailer thing...



I think I've written about this project here before? Anyway I started it in 2014- built it up to a point where everything "worked" but it was a huge clusterfuck mess of bad code and terrible architecture-

Long story short- I've educated myself and worked hard to be a better programmer and game developer and I'm back working on this game- building it back up from scratch- I'm redoing everything except the art/animation/sound/fx as I can re-use that stuff-

I'm doing all the low level systems first- I built the "chemical" interaction system which is inspired by basic Rock/Paper/Scissors Rpg stuff like water + cold = ice- with a dash of inspiration from Breath of the Wild's chemistry system- I never played that game- I don't play many but I study them like a scientist ^_^

I built the Save/Load/Persistent data system- I'm using Scriptable Object instances for all of it- they are pretty awesome in that you can serialize/de-serialize them to/from Json for a save/load system-

I built out the Scene Load/Stream system- I AsyncLoad "major" scenes which are broken up into smaller sub scenes that are additively loaded/unloaded using this SceneStreamer asset

The scene save/load system is tied into the Scene load/stream system nicely so that all persistent data is saved/loaded automatically-

I also made all the classes that use/access persistent data and made sure they all work fine- stuff like Doors staying unlocked once they have been opened- pickups not re-spawning once they are picked up- stuff like that-

Then I made the Inventory system- I built it into a SingletonScriptableObject class- I got the idea from this post here-

I store all this SuperScriptableObjects on my lone mono Singleton "GameManager" so they always be accessed easily through "TheirName".Instance- I built in functionality so each inventory item contains a separate scriptableObject that stores its "stat modifiers" i.e. what it does to the players stats upon equipping it so that when things are equipped they automatically apply stat changes to the player- they remove them when unequipped-

Right now I'm working on the Dialogue system functionally + integrating it with the other systems I mentioned above-

So lately my life is all code and no art- GISTO is my best friend right now- if you use GIST and want/need a gist manager gisto is awesome

I'm really coming to enjoy rebuilding these games systems in a clean, decoupled, optimized way- I can't wait to remake the gameplay systems as I had some cool shit going on with the original and now I know I can make is 10x better ^_^

I never thought I would have gotten into programming like I have- I really, really enjoy the code side of things- I still love animation, music, storytelling and all that stuff too- its just that I get to express and organize/optimize things in a way with code that I can't do in other ways- maybe if I wrote music notation it would scratch a similar itch?

One of my good friends irl I've know for about 15 years who works as a programmer told me he wasn't surprised that I had taken to it- he said that it was "just a matter of time" in his mind- when we met each other in the early 2000's we were both working in Flash doing web design- he was more into the actionscript/coding side of it and I was more into the animation-

Many of my early animations contained flash .swf files I had made then converted/imported into After Effects- the second iteration of the character "Rain" from We Are The Strange was an animated Flash loop I had made- the first iteration being a charcoal drawing I made as a teenager-

Anyway- enough about code and the like- I started writing this post to say something about films-

Being away from filmmaking, art, animation, storytelling has given me a new perspective on it- I feel like I can finally really see what is important in those spaces-

I wrote/storyboarded a spooky animated short film last October I haven't had time to do yet but I will make it in the next 6 months-

I also have a several text files filled with story/movie/game ideas from over the years- there's one in there that I think is a very powerful story that needs to be told- BUT the subject matter or should I say in the way one could interpret the subject matter/themes/archetypes- it would probably be censored if it was placed on a centralized non-free speech friendly video platform like Youtube-

I know about Dtube, PewTube and all the other current Youtube alternatives but none of them are truly decentralized/censorship resistant-

When I make this film I want it to stay up for people to see- So I will make another original animated feature film and it will be my best work to date in that space- I'm just going to wait until theres a space for me to put it so the lunatics banning everything these days won't be able to touch it-

Actually there's probably 2 or 3 animated feature film ideas I have in my backlog but I'm not sure I'll have the time to do my "one man army" thing on all three since I want to focus on coding/interactive for another 5-7 years so I'll probably end up just writing/directing them and hiring modelers/animators etc to grind on them-

It's 8:44am and I've been up programming all night so I'm going to quote Party When It's Over from my recent DOTTIR album I did with my wife-

The time for normal is over, the time for cliches is gone 

The time for the nonsense, they sayin, is lying dead on your lawn  

Raise the flag and burn the dead Nod yer head and fill ‘em full of lead, yeah 

I'm almost finished warming up- I'm almost finished playing around- soon enough, my true creative potential will be unleashed- its just taken 15 or so years so get around to learning everything I needed to learn before I could do my best work ^_^