Summary: In which progress in demo-building is made; the performance of a specific interaction is improved; and the question of funding is considered.
Greetings and salutations!
For once, this week I have no screenshot, I'm afraid: the week just past was a very slow one, I fear, and while some things did get done, they tended towards non-visual changes.
As to what was done:
Monday, March 12. 2018
The Question of Funding
The largest task of the week just past was perhaps the continuation of work towards building a demo. I believe that as of last week's blog-post I hadn't yet managed to complete a build. Well, with the help of the Panda3D forum, I passed that hurdle in the week just past!
However, the first resultant build crashed pretty much immediately after startup. Some of the issues in effect were fairly simple: including an additional "import" statement to tell the build system that I wanted particles, or fixing a library name that I had entered incorrectly, for two examples.
The first more-serious issue, perhaps, was with the language-scripts (which hold the various lines of player-readable text). Panda's new build-system automatically finds modules that are imported into a project in the normal way. However, it doesn't detect dynamic importation--such as I use for the language-scripts, as well as other elements, like level-scripts. As a result, the game was failing to find the language files, and keeling over.
Still, as it turns out, the build-system does allow the developer to direct it to any modules that might be dynamically imported. But this in turn prompted me to realise that I didn't want the language-scripts, at least, to be "frozen" into the build. I wanted them separate, to allow for the possibility of simply "dropping in" translations at a later date, should the game ever be translated. (Level-scripts and the like I'm happy to have "frozen" into the build, I've decided.)
I gave the matter some thought, and at the time found no terribly neat solution. As things stand now, the build-system produces a simple archive, so it's easy enough to just include the language-scripts in manually. For now, that works. For the future, I'm told that allowing the storage of nominated Python files by the build-system has been added to the "to-do list" by the developers.
The next--and current, at time of writing--blockage is related to the texture-references in models: for some reason the build system (or perhaps the tool that converts model-files, and which is used by the build-system) seems to be storing incorrect file-paths to model-textures, causing the game to once again break. I've reported this issue, and am waiting for a response!
Aside from work on the build, I made only a few changes. Most were minor, or were not kept.
The only one that seems worth mentioning here is that I improved the performance of a particular action in the first level: I had noticed that this action (breaking some loose tiles) incurred a pause that was brief, but palpable. Guessing that the problem was that I was loading certain assets when the action took place, I instead loaded them when the level-script started--and indeed, that brief pause seems to be gone now!
(While that action was the only one that exhibited a pause that I noticed, I went through the script and moved other instances of asset-loading to script start-up as well--it seems like better practice, to me.)
Moving away from the game itself, the other issue that I gave time to in the week just past was the question of funding.
Up until now I'd had a thought to perhaps crowdfund the game once a demo was out. Having researched that, it looks as though it's possible to do so from this country--but also that there might be some problems with it. As I'm working alone, and as I'm no lawyer, and not enormously confident with business-stuff, I'm now somewhat hesitant to pursue that path.
So I started looking into the possibility of finding a publisher. I've started research into this (and have a short preliminary list), but I still have some questions and concerns; I may well start one or more forum-threads, seeking advice.
On the other hand, a respondent to a query of mine on Twitter suggested one more possible path: finding an investor, of the sort that takes a specified financial return after release, rather than the sort that takes equity. As things stand, I'm not sure of how to find such a person. ^^;
And if anyone reading this has any advice or suggestions, please do share them!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
However, the first resultant build crashed pretty much immediately after startup. Some of the issues in effect were fairly simple: including an additional "import" statement to tell the build system that I wanted particles, or fixing a library name that I had entered incorrectly, for two examples.
The first more-serious issue, perhaps, was with the language-scripts (which hold the various lines of player-readable text). Panda's new build-system automatically finds modules that are imported into a project in the normal way. However, it doesn't detect dynamic importation--such as I use for the language-scripts, as well as other elements, like level-scripts. As a result, the game was failing to find the language files, and keeling over.
Still, as it turns out, the build-system does allow the developer to direct it to any modules that might be dynamically imported. But this in turn prompted me to realise that I didn't want the language-scripts, at least, to be "frozen" into the build. I wanted them separate, to allow for the possibility of simply "dropping in" translations at a later date, should the game ever be translated. (Level-scripts and the like I'm happy to have "frozen" into the build, I've decided.)
I gave the matter some thought, and at the time found no terribly neat solution. As things stand now, the build-system produces a simple archive, so it's easy enough to just include the language-scripts in manually. For now, that works. For the future, I'm told that allowing the storage of nominated Python files by the build-system has been added to the "to-do list" by the developers.
The next--and current, at time of writing--blockage is related to the texture-references in models: for some reason the build system (or perhaps the tool that converts model-files, and which is used by the build-system) seems to be storing incorrect file-paths to model-textures, causing the game to once again break. I've reported this issue, and am waiting for a response!
Aside from work on the build, I made only a few changes. Most were minor, or were not kept.
The only one that seems worth mentioning here is that I improved the performance of a particular action in the first level: I had noticed that this action (breaking some loose tiles) incurred a pause that was brief, but palpable. Guessing that the problem was that I was loading certain assets when the action took place, I instead loaded them when the level-script started--and indeed, that brief pause seems to be gone now!
(While that action was the only one that exhibited a pause that I noticed, I went through the script and moved other instances of asset-loading to script start-up as well--it seems like better practice, to me.)
Moving away from the game itself, the other issue that I gave time to in the week just past was the question of funding.
Up until now I'd had a thought to perhaps crowdfund the game once a demo was out. Having researched that, it looks as though it's possible to do so from this country--but also that there might be some problems with it. As I'm working alone, and as I'm no lawyer, and not enormously confident with business-stuff, I'm now somewhat hesitant to pursue that path.
So I started looking into the possibility of finding a publisher. I've started research into this (and have a short preliminary list), but I still have some questions and concerns; I may well start one or more forum-threads, seeking advice.
On the other hand, a respondent to a query of mine on Twitter suggested one more possible path: finding an investor, of the sort that takes a specified financial return after release, rather than the sort that takes equity. As things stand, I'm not sure of how to find such a person. ^^;
And if anyone reading this has any advice or suggestions, please do share them!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
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