Sometimes I work for 8 hours with almost no results. Sometimes, I can do much more in 3 hours.

Things that help me (examples from IC05 demo): write down a detailed, roughly prioretized task list. If I don’t write it down and keep tasks in my head, I often spend too much time polishing not-so-important features. With task list, I update it constantly; at the same time I get sort of ‘summary’ of remaining work.

Another one: really concentrate. Turn off music (for some reason I can’t work while music is playing… especially if the music is good, I start listening to it), close the doors, tell the child ‘go play with mom instead’ :), etc.

More: disconnect from the net while working :)

An interesting problem: I’m writing my Master’s thesis and have tough time translating smoothie (from Rendering Fake Soft Shadows with Smoothies) and skirt (Smooth Penumbra Transitions with Shadow Maps).

Both thanslate into weird stuff!

Writing thesis at the university is weird, you have to write 50 pages of poo just to present 5 pages of useful information. Introductions, overviews, previous works, aims, hopes, discussions, explanations of unrelated stuff etc.

I have a temptation to put a small picture of some dragon or a naked chick :) somewhere inside just to test if anyone really reads that crap.

So I went and put the sourcecode of our engine and the current (in progress) demo at BerliOS, so far only the Subversion tree (browse it online here).

The ‘engine’, called dingus (don’t ask me why :)), is the one that was born for LTGameJam2003, based on some previous experience and insights from people more clever than me. Variations of it were used in all ‘serious’ nesnausk! demos so far, and in my personal projects as well. The sourcetree at BerliOS has no exporters/tools commited in yet, that will be at some later time. Of course, no real documentation is written for the engine.

Besides the engine, there’s ic2005 project that’s, well, the sourcecode for our WIP demo for ImagineCup2005. No art assets in any form are committed in, sorry :)

At some later time I’ll put the sourcecode for our other demos/projects as well. Maybe.

Update: mesh and animation exporters for 3dsMax added to svn. Other tools pending.

We’re going into heavy crunch mode to finish our ImagineCup demo on time. The demo alone would be nothing, but when you add up TheRealWork, master’s thesis, the demo and some sleep, you quickly run out of hours available during the day. Take one out of that, and it’s manageable :)

Anyway. I feel kinda strange about the direction our demos are taking. Much like the game industry, we’re going the ‘content shoveling’ way. Paulius’ first ‘serious’ demo, Demo 612, was low in content amount on purpose. Our other demo, The Fly, already had some content; programming part was already the minor one.

In this demo, I project that we’re putting 5x more effort than into ‘The Fly’, and something like 90% of the total effort goes into art content (models, textures, animations etc.). It would better look good in the end! I once thought that for some reason we ‘raised the bar’ so much that it’s hard for ourselves to jump over it.

This kind of scares me. The overall trend is that with each demo we’re doing much more content, while the ‘code’ part remains pretty constant in size/complexity. What’s coming next? Will we need 5 artists working for 5 months just to make a demo?

After this demo, I want to take the usual 2-3 month break; and then try something different. Something more abstract, with more intelligent code and less massive art content. I admire kewlers very much – somehow they are able to make great demos ‘out of nothing’ :)

Been thinking about how we should synchronize the visuals and the music in our demo… So I went and watched some of the classic demos, paying some extra attention at how they do it.

Synchronization aside, the demo that still touches me very deeply is Gerbera by Moppi. It’s old (2001) and already starting to show it’s age visually, but the whole mood, ‘storyline’ (whatever that is), the tiny writings and the music is fascinating.

Directions makes us unable to choose our paths. Wonderful.

I’ve done some very basic walk/run animation blending. The results are pretty neat!

We have several walk animation cycles, each for different walk/run speed. Now I can smoothly move the character at any speed, and the right animations are selected, synchronized, mixed; and the walk is mixed in/out of another animations.

As a basis I’ve taken Tom Forsyth’s talk from GameTech2004 and Charles Bloom’s rambles (dated 3-13-03). Of course, our case is somewhat simpler (e.g. we don’t have manpower to author all turn left/right, accelerate/decelerate, etc. anims).

Try it yourself – it’s good! :)

BTW, I was thinking about putting our full engine/tools/whatever somewhere, in case anyone is interested or maybe would find it useful. Well, I know, the naked sourcecode is not useful at all in the real world, but still :)

A must read article for any game developer wannabe here:

Your industry heroes work like dogs too. Ask a Blizzard employee what their “core” hours were for the last year+ before WoW launched. Or a Bungie employee leading up to Halo shipping. And those are the lucky ones. For every studio that turned out a brilliant game, multiple other teams of equally cool people ended up wasting years of their lives working on games that never saw the light of day, came out stillborn or got pushed out early and died an ignominious screaming bug-filled death.

Don’t even get me started on the core work hours for Japanese studios.

How sad, and how true…