Step By Step Towards Our Goals
Every last working day of the current month I publish a report reflecting on the previous month. These reflections exist to demonstrate my progress, share my experiences and help transfer what I learn to others.
The Past Month
During September I worked on my current flagship project Against Sahara, helped Unreal Bahrain with a lot of tasks for the community and finished going through the Houdini Fundamentals Book.
Against Sahara – Current Status
Designing a card game that is fun, engaging and has educational value proved a lot more difficult than I first realized.
While I originally planned to finalize the design by first week of September, I’m still designing as of today since research is taking a lot more time than first realized.
I’ve gone through 5 iterations so far where I redesigned the entire gameplay and continue to edit and playtest.
I just received today a book I bought as a reference material on the Berber people who live in the Sahara, who’re my game’s characters belong to.
I expect a few more changes to the game’s design after going through the book to make it more representative of the Berber people and their lifestyle.
So far, the gameplay is almost done, all the cards been designed and the story is conceptualized but the gameplay and story is yet to be finalized.
Learning Houdini
I’ve finished the Houdini Fundamentals Book, and started making simple things like low poly books and heightfield maps without tutorials to better learn the tool.
Unfortunately the Houdini Apprentice license doesn’t allow me to export FBX or use the Houdini Engine for UE4, so until I buy a subscription I won’t know how my models look in engine.
I will be buying a license soon of course but only after I learned the tool well and started making assets for Against Sahara, since the sub is quite expensive.
New Weekly Schedule Review
Last month I started a new weekly schedule, and after reviewing my work and progress for the month of September I can happily say the experiment proved successful!.
My energy and focus are better than ever and the game has been progressing steadily.
The only thing is I feel am not progressing fast enough on my Houdini skills or the game, but I’ll refrain from any further adjustments for the next month as new habits need time to prove their worth.
Helping and Being Helped by the Community
Mahmood Alsarhani from Regnum Studio kicked off a new weekly event for the game dev community in Bahrain called Co-Dev Day.
Every Saturday Bahraini game devs gather in a coffee shop and work along side each other on their games.
I’ve joined the first Co-Dev Day and did a spontaneous one on Thursday last week with Adel and can say it helps a lot for focus and also to get feedback from each other.
I’ve also taken quite a bit of time off from my game to help organize the next Unreal Bahrain meetup on 6th October.
Working together on our individual goals and helping each other makes everyone more likely to succeed and I’m immensely grateful for all the work Yusuf, Mahmood, Noof, Moneim and all the contributors put into the community.
What’s Next: Finalizing Design & Building First Digital Playable for Against Sahara
Not much left design-wise so I’m likely to finish it within next two weeks, afterwards I’ll start work on creating the digital version of the game.
I’m aiming on depicting 1/4th or less of the final game in a demo, which will include the first phase of the game along with finalized art.
But for next month the goal is to build a playable with placeholder assets only to further test how the game will be played on screen.
This ends this month’s report, hope you enjoyed and if you have any feedback please comment below 🙂 .