Flan's Blog

I did a panel recently about designing a game for modding, and had a general chat about mods from both a modder's and a developer's perspective. It's the first time I've done a panel since getting involved on the other side as developer for TerraTech mod support. While it may be more developer focused, there's plenty of advice for modders scattered in amongst the talk.

I've been getting a lot of extra free time now I'm not commuting every day, and I have been spending an awful lot of it playing Minecraft. I'm running a medium-size custom-built modpack with 2 of my housemates, and while looking at other modpacks I was tempted by the idea of making my own quest mod to guide progress and ease the gathering of some of the more obtuse mob drops. Picking up Minecraft Forge again felt so familiar, and creating a mod from scratch was incredibly satisfying. Every time I've popped back previously, it has been in response to people asking for Flan's Mod updates, and updating is never a fun experience. Forge is really well designed to get you making what you want to make very quickly and takes away a lot of faff. Not all of the faff, mind you, and I don't even want to talk about the .json blockstate system. Day 1 was re-learning the tools and making strange box-people. The mod has come together in two days, just about. I can't ...

Getting a Unity project from the jam phase into something more long-lived is really tough and I've been struggling to motivate myself to make progress recently. There are fairly obvious holes in the foundation of the game that I know I should fill first; ship controls, interaction code and all that. Today though, I wanted to make something shiny; a distinct visual upgrade over the janky modelling tools I've been using so far. I had opened Blender on Friday and made some first steps with the sculpting tools, so I already had this lumpy crocodile head as a placeholder to work with. The first experiment this morning was into using bones to stretch a mesh to allow character customisation. I learnt a lot about bones, implemented this random body changer, and then realised that there were much better tools for the job. Following a tutorial from Minions Art  I learnt about Blender's blend shapes and shrinkwrap. There's a lot to digest here, but from what I...

This week has been focused on improving O Captain and then trying to bring it back to 100% demo functionality in order to share a Post-Jam version. Improvements have gone well, we now have a separate interior and exterior world with portals between them (as explained in previous blogpost) and I've snazzified the ship interior and exterior with AssetForge. Functionality is coming back online slowly, but there are a handful of things that don't work immediately with the new portal tech, so I'm hoping to wrap things up on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy this gif of the new interior and a picture of the exterior.