I am sitting here waiting for the project to finish baking…

No I haven’t lost my temper and thrown a laptop in the oven. When you build games in Unity (and possibly in other software but it may be called something different) you have to occasionally stop and bake the lighting. This is to ‘set’ some of the things that you know are going to stay fixed, eg some of the shadows of non-moving objects, and it helps the speed at which you can play the finished game. It basically means that when you play the game, the computer is not having to process so much information as you look around the scenery.   It can be time-consuming, but one of the machines we are using is managing to bake in about 30 minutes or so, which is good.

While I sit here and watch the little blue bar progress at the bottom of the screen (5/15 Bake AO | 5 jobs) I am also going through my notes of what we are meant to have done, are doing and still need to do. I’ll be waving goodbye to Paul & Sean at the end of tomorrow as the funds to pay them run out then, so in May I will be slowly picking my way through and doing very minor tweaks and edits. And possibly emailing them to ask all sorts of irritating questions.

Anyway, before Paul & Sean go (i.e. tomorrow) I want to send out an interim build for all those testers who were promised an interim build about a fortnight ago – possibly longer – time flies!! Hence the baking and a bit of tweaking of information screens. It will be interesting to see how much more is needed in the way of instructions to players. Part of me wants people to work everything out by accident, but I have been told a few times to stop trying to be subtle. (12/15 Bake Indirect | 4 jobs) And I have just remembered I have not included any information at all about the acorns! Will people go looking for them or do I have to spell it out for them? And will they know what to do with them when they find them?

We shall see…