Back in the Helm

I've been really demotivated to work on Magelore lately, but I think the worst of it is past now. I had a bad cold and cough for about 3 weeks - painful. I still have remnants of the cough but the cold is gone.  Work has been very taxing - I'm working on an xbox/ps3 downloadable arcade title and the timeframe and code team is quite small. However, the workload is very creative and the game looks like it will be a really good title so I've been happy to put in lots of hours. Whenever I'm being creative at work, its takes from my drive to be creative in my home projects - I think I have a fixed per-day creativity budget.

I jumped onto Twitter today and have been tweeting with the creators of Rogue Touch and Sword of Fargoal on iPhone and its been a great motivator for me.  They're both doing very well - Rogue Touch is on sale and jumped into the top 25 list for RPGs which is awesome. So I'm back into MageLore again.  I've reworked the main menu now to be a simple 3 slot profile creation screen. You can delete a profile by dragging the delete icon from across the profile - I'm hoping this is enough to stop any accidental deletion. However, my 3 yr old has been happily deleting saved games from all my ipad apps and this technique wouldn't really stop him. I think its nicer than a "Do you want to delete Y/N" requester though.

I also pop up my own keyboard layer now. I spent a few hours playing with the UIKit keyboard overlay but it seems to be heavily biased towards automatically coming up when you use the appropriate UIKit control - which is not much use for me since all my UI is custom OpenGL code.

Anyway, feels like a proper game flow now - create a character, rename him, watch the intro video, and play, or select an existing profile and jump straight into the game.

I think things will move fast once I start adding some quests again. I've not nutted out my overall story yet. Maybe I should take some notes on the train to/from work - though I'm usually trying to catch up on sleep on my train rides...

Anyway, stuff is happening - so I just need to keep up motivation and stay in the saddle.