SN Reorganized
thedenrei posted in Uncategorized on August 25th, 2006
With everyone in such close proximity now, I had thought that things like meetings wouldn’t have to be scheduled and things would more or less organize themselves when they needed to happen. But this doesn’t seem to be how things will work. The “problem” is that we operate as a group of friends first, and an elite team of independent game makers second. I tend to be overly pushy in terms of my expectations of others at times, and I’m trying to be very aware of this – but at the same time it will take some discipline to get anything done.
Chris is fortunate to have an interesting and stimulating full time day job. Unfortunately for the team, this is eating up the bulk of his coding energies. This last week or so, the team is been feeling out adjustments to the working style that our new living arrangements demand.
Maybe this makes it sound like there are all kinds of problems, but in the big picture things are definitely cool.
Part of the plan is that Tony will be taking over the bulk of the actual code generation “monkey work”, and Chris’ time will be more focused on design decisions. This solves the problem of Chris being over worked as well as making Tony more involved and capable with the game engine we are developing (which Chris authored). Additionally, I’ve started looking deeper into MEL (Maya’s scripting language) so that I can take the load of tool creation. This too is a good arrangement for multiple reasons. I have the best understanding of what Maya is already capable of, and how it can be practiced most effectively. While writing MEL is a “coding” task – it really belongs in the realm of asset creation. We’ve got Gavin running through the tutorials Maya provides, so that he can help out in the near future with simpler asset related tasks. I’d be interested to see a blog post of his thoughts as he learns the system.
My first MEL task will be to create a referencing system, so that I can build a level in which I can place objects made elsewhere. I’ve got a few ideas I’m excited about, but I’ll save that for another post once things get more cleanly laid out.
Ordered 2 books from amazon,
- 1 of: Complete Maya Programming: An Extensive Guide to MEL and C++ API (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)
- 1 of: Complete Maya Programming, Vol. II: An In-Depth Guide to 3D Fundamentals, Geometry, and Modeling (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics and Geom
I’ve been able to finish the section on MEL in the first book, and it’s pretty thorough. Might have liked more examples. The API stuff is a bit over my head, I haven’t touched C++ for something like 2 years now, but I’m definitely interested to explore that sometime if it looks like it could be useful.
PubCrawl has been sitting around waiting for Internet. Should be able to post that tonight or something. I had a pretty clear idea of the type of game I wanted to represent in the milestone, and I think it comes through in the game play to some degree. I hope you have some fun with it.
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