In the last weeks/months, there have been some pretty big changes in my life. I quit my job working as a concrete/asphalt/drywall/tile finisher for a plumbing company in the Phoenix area, and my loving (and extremely patient) wife and I moved back to my hometown in northern Wyoming. I've gone back to work doing woodworking: cabinets, hand-crafted furniture, CNC wood machining and carving, etc... Stuff I love. It's been great, despite the risks involved in the move and the inconvenience of hauling 24 feet of household stuff in a crappy Budget truck 1200 miles across wintry western landscape, rife with breakdowns and multi-day delays and shenanigans. But to once again come home at the end of the day, smelling of sweet cedar and hickory sawdust, rather than sweat and concrete and dirt and sewage, is pretty awesome. Just finished installing a custom set of hickory cabinets, an excellent way to polish up some rusty skills and get back in the groove.
Unfortunately, my old boss hired me back on during a period of extreme "crunch", so it's been >12 hr days of rush, rush, rush; and Goblinson Crusoe has suffered for it. I hate to lose momentum on a project like that, because I am notorious for being unable to pick it back up again for long periods of time. I've dabbled, I've fiddled, I've twiddled; but I haven't really made concrete progress in over a week. Some icons, a new critter, but nothing of real substance.
But most disconcertingly, my old nemesis, Doubt, has once again reared its hideous, slavering head, this time surfacing in the form of the age-old question," 2D vs 3D?" I've fought this fight before, and it is one I am incapable of winning decisively. I love 2D isometric, I really do. Some of my fondest gaming memories are of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, Sacred, Divine Divinity, and countless other 2D isometric RPGs. I love the expressive style, the detailed environments, the "old school" feel of it all. Goblinson Crusoe is currently 2D in nearly every sense of the word: pre-rendered in every detail, taking place on a standard 2D plane world. But speaking with [member='EDI'] on Facebook the other day, trading "war stories" and discussing current projects, reminded me of all my old gripes in regards to 2D: the memory inflation of storing 40-some frames of pre-rendered animations, in 8 or 16 different facing directions; the difficulties of doing component-based paper-doll character equipment systems in pre-rendered 2D; the time sink of re-rendering whole animation sets following a minor character model tweak; the hacks; the kludges; the shenanigans and skullduggery. It's not a new argument for me, indeed it's one that I thought I was done with years ago, having at one point decided I would switch to 3D once and for all. Nevertheless, I regressed with GC because GC was initially only a very quickly slapped together tech demo illustrating procedural island generation, a tech demo that grew into a prototype and then into a fledgling game. And here I am, full circle, right back to where I was years ago when I was kludging away on my doomed Golem project and fighting with the same issues that I am fighting with now on Goblinson Crusoe.
True 3D just offers so, so many advantages over the "old school" 2.5D approach of isometric engines. And as hardware increases, I can't even console myself with the old arguments in favor of 2.5D anymore. True 3D games these days are capable of an exceptional amount of detail, and the advantages and ease of use far outweigh any perceived advantages of 2.5D. There is a reason that Blizzard, after completing D2, vowed that they wouldn't do another 2D game.
So maybe it's for the best that I got delayed this past week. Perhaps it has kept me from proceeding with the 2.5D mistake, that might mire me in distaste as I was so mired during development of Golem. Making the switch to 3D from a coding standpoint is trivial: I already have the Ogre3D backend for the Accidental Library (the foundation of GC and all of my recent projects) written, and the change would only affect perhaps 4 or 5 of my components. At this point, I have not sunk significant amounts time into the creation of pre-rendered 2D assets, so making the switch now won't be nearly the upheaval that it would be in, say, 4 months time.
So, anyway, that will be my project for the next couple weeks, in between work and time spent with the wife.
