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Welcome friend, my name is J.N Pickee (haha, well that’s my pen name)
In late July of 2018, I was hit with unexpected feedback, after 7 years of working on a project in the form of a Gamebook, people just couldn't get it, and it finally dawned on me at this time, the people give me good feedback to change this project into a video game.
And so I toke the risk of starting almost completely over from scratch, giving myself another chance, defeated from the loss but determined I started to look in what type of game I was going to go for, a 2d game or a 3d game, I made my decision based on wanting to give the player the best I can offer, and so it was 3d.
So I looked into a free program called Blender3d and a youtuber named “Darin Lile” and thus a new journey began, I chose my “Vortex The Pretty” project as the conversion subject due to it’s simple design and for the rest of that summer I built 3d models for the characters and environments of the game.
In the beginning of fall of 2018, I started to look into what framework I would be building my game off of, my first choice was Unreal Engine because of it’s blueprints feature, but due to my weak hardware and limited financial resources, I had to rethink the engine.
Then I stumbled across Panda3d, during that summer in my freetime I dabbed a little in python because it was advertised as “easy to use”, and I learned, it worked vary similar to a calculator but with labels, Panda3d works with python, so going in with that mindset, I begun my work, and the engine did not agree with me.
I had to battle it like a bear (pun intended), but thankfully I was not alone, the Panda3d community was beyond great, sticking with me, I edited one of my 3d models I created in the summer and slapped it on a simple plane and thus my game sprouted, each day for the fall I would create and work on new features, it was so daunting almost gave up and installed unity ready to switch, but I already things working on panda3d, I couldn't give up!
And so I persevered with the help of the community, at the dawn of winter I changed the basic model to “Vortex” and thus the “Vortex The Pretty” alpha begun and during winter of 2018 I worked and toiled on it to give it form, and in spring of 2019 I began to form it into a demo to show everyone.
In early June 2019, a functional alpha of Vortex The Pretty was released, and soon after development of the conversion of Exuberant Extraordinaries was started, in late July a optimized version of Vortex The Pretty was released, the Exuberant Extraordinaries Porject was put on hold for now, and fixes and a graphical upgrade to Vortex The Pretty was made at the end of September 2019, and moving onto the Soul Opinion project in October!
The Vortex The Pretty game was not getting any notice though, with advice and consolation from my mother, she concluded that maybe because it was about a female lead and had a “Pretty Princess” aura about it, it appealed too much for girls, and she thought girls don't play video games, so being conspiracy nut (like me) she thought why not change it to appeal to boys using cryptids, and so the brother project “Whirligig Willies” was conceived.
I gave some time to quickly covert a copy of Vortex The Pretty with some tweaks to “Whirligig Willies” but I did not want to take away from “Vortex” so I quickly shelved the project and just continued with Soul Opinion, through October 2019 and January 2020, completely rebuilt new code base for Soul Opinion every using self variables over global.
During February and March 2020 I sought to use a new way to load levels removing the use of extra level scripts and utilizing object names to carry over information to the game instead, but in April 2020, everything changed, the covid 19 dilemma came and my mother got sick amidst it and was sent to the hospital, to keep my mind off of the disaster, I continued to work on Soul Opinion adding a new cut-scene and pet fallowing features.
But in May 2020, bad news hit, when my mom died in the hospital, Things really changed, you see, over the past couple years, my mom was always concerned for my health because I focused my entire life on this project possibly getting sick from it too, that maybe some of those negatives rubbed off to her aiding in her death, with that thought process I would honor her one last time and take the suggestion she gave me.
The “Whirligig Willies” project that is, and make it my last project if I did not get the reception that I liked, so after some mourning, I picked up and toke the Soul Opinion project I slowly started to translate Vortex The Pretty to that new codebase during May and June 2020 which shelved Soul Opinion.
In July 2020, I finished the demo, but because it is possibly my last game, I wanted to give it the best shot I can throw, so I extended it by polishing the cut-scene feature and adding event features with some mini games in them, the creatives would be made during July while real code work would be done in August 2020, and so in September 2020, the game is ready, a true demo, let’s see if this finally works.
This vary can be my last project, so I end off by saying take care friend and thanks for listening.
If you want to contact me, you can use my E-mail Address, at jpickyp@aol.com |