Getting Started

I started developing the idea of Playground in early 2020. I wanted this project to be more ambitious than its predecessors and so I decided to make a third-person game with an animated main character. With just those two criteria, I knew that the game had a large scope and would take me some time to make - but I was up for the challenge.

For the third-person aspect, I'd need to spend time working on camera and character movement. I wanted to use controller input for this game, so I would need to familiarize and implement something for that as well. Last, to support animating the main character, I'd need to implement animation importing as well as playback. And of course I knew that more would shake out as I began developing things lol. Nevertheless, I was well into the ambitious category and had a lot to do.

That's a brief intro into what I've been up to, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the COVID-19 pandemic. I live in the US, and around March 2020 many facilities across the country closed to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus as the number of infected/killed people was rising daily. During this time, many people lost their jobs and had to file for unemployment and/or dip into their savings to make ends meet. Some people were more fortunate and were able to transition to working remotely from home. For myself, I was transitioning from fulltime employment to remote contracting at the beginning of March, so I was fortunate to be able to continue working. The year was spent trying to stay healthy, working, and touching base with family/friends to make sure everyone was safe and doing well. Working on this project served as a bit of an escape from the anxiety of the pandemic and continues to be a source of challenge/enjoyment for me.

That's pretty much it for this first post. Stay tuned for more devlogs about this project.