A tiring and somewhat frustrating day. I started with regular monthly backups, then relaunched A Walk in the Countryside and queued up my new Synaesthesia album. I'm pleased I did this... working on it was fun and particularly artistic. It set me a mood to check though everything in Taskforce from the sky, seeing the whole project at once.
After that I decided that I wanted my villain, October Morgane, to walk and shoot. It felt wrong to shoot an unarmed villain in any mission! Not only unarmed, this dummy was very dummy-like. He just stood there and rotated. I've given him legs and a pistol. Amusingly, he was 20% bigger than he should have been at first, evoking images of Sark from Tron.
This process took a long time. I had to find the 'Executive' object and basically copy most of the texture from him, all except the face, and then copy the face from the dummy Morgane. Everything seemed to go wrong; little things here and there. Then I revisited the final mission of the game. This is the most linear of all missions. Regular blog readers will be aware of my love of the non-linear in missions, so I spend an hour or two revamping this... then playing it...
...but it didn't work. For a finale, a climax, the linear helps because it builds to a specific point, a showdown. If you could watch Star Wars in any order, it might be fun, but you really need the Death Star to explode at the end, not in the middle or the start. Also, this is the conclusion of the whole game, so should (and does) feature a cameo from everyone in the game, ending in a climactic confrontation with the super-villain. With a few cosmetic changes, I restored the original mission.
Andrew reported a bug that I should have detected myself; that Config files are overwritten by Steam because they, naturally, change when playing, yet their initial state is shipped with the game. The problem here is that storing them is important to keep the user's mission progress, so I've got round it by having two; a start config for the first run and a subsequent one for any runs after that.
I've also tried a bit of music (the music will be, generally, a bluesy, dystopian rock), and experimented with new sound effects. The ones in the game so far sound a little crude and Amiga-like. I can do better now - if I have time.
I'll conclude with a picture of the final Synaesthesia cover. It will be released on May 29th:
