final update & darklands

final project

I’m a little stressed this week because I’ve had some personal problems that have made me feel behind, but generally I feel pretty good about our Pokemon Snap “clone.” Surprisingly, though, we’ve had a pretty smooth time with Git so far. This week, I worked on getting the camera movement working, and we all thought about exactly where on the map each monster would be located and started sketching out what we want them to look like. We also be gan modeling some of the scenery in Blender. (For me, that meant starting to model some jungle trees and sketching out monsters like birds, goats, and a big Snorlax-esque creature who would be asleep on the mountainside.)

darklands

Darklands fell apart because it had a project leader who wasn’t well informed about the genre, and on top of that, had a “hands-off” approach which allowed for confusion and miscommunication to creep in.

If I were in charge of the Darklands development team, I would have cut many of the small but laborious details like weapon penetration values and the wildly complex character creation system. Most likely, these features could be boiled down into something much simpler to create and probably even more fun to play.

I’d keep a lot of the setting and world details, which seem fascinating and unique. Maybe we don’t need hundreds of textual vignettes and a whole pantheon of saints to grant players favors, but the idea of those things existing in a smaller scale sound pretty interesting.