![\"Normal](\"http:\/\/www.rakkar.org\/blog\/images\/normalmapping.jpg\")
\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\t\t\t\tI wrote out a 26 page game design doc yesterday. Although I’m practically the only one reading it it helped a lot because it turns a loose collection of ideas into something cohesive and developed. I was able to resolve several design problems by doing it. A nice effect of writing it is I was able to put down every creative idea I had without regard to implementation details. When I think of stuff I usually also consider how well it fits into existing code, which limits my creativity.<\/p>\n
The game design doc also helps because knowing what features I’m going to have, I’m able to write a list of exact features I need to implement. This means I can do specific implementations rather than loose and vague concepts where I’m not sure what I need. It makes things MUCH easier without really losing flexibility since I still program flexible interfaces where it will have obvious use.<\/p>\n
My first pass at the programming feature list was almost pointlessly high level and glossed over all the potential problems. So halfway through I stopped and went over again, forcing myself to think of where I would actually begin coding. That made a tremendous positive difference. Doing this, I am solving difficult programming problems in minutes in my head as compared to hours of refactoring code. Additionally, I think of unforseen features and find better ways to implement them than I would have otherwise. One example is that I was originally going to write a physics editor out of context. Various editors that needed physics would load a predefined physics file. Upon review, I found that without context it would have very limited use and that furthermore I need the same editor for both the ship design, weapon design, and base design screens. Making that change substantiallly changes how I was going to design all of these elements and I wouldn’t have done it if I had already started coding.<\/p>\n
Lastly, here’s my first render of a ship using normal mapping.<\/p>\n
\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I wrote out a 26 page game design doc yesterday. Although I’m practically the only one reading it it helped a lot because it turns a loose collection of ideas into something cohesive and developed. I was able to resolve several design problems by doing it. A nice effect of writing it is I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}