Been taking it nice and easy lately. Mostly because it's been a drag, creating new levels n' all. Working in Maya is probably easy peasy lemon squeezy for the dark side, but I have to do everything twice or more. For instance, creating a shadow map for my desert level, I copied the original level, removed all the individual physical objects by hand (just keeping the meshes), added a new "invisible" material - so that all objects would only leave their shadows, not themselves, on the map - replacing a palm leaf texture with a "sand colored" palm leaf texture and then I rendered from the top view, saved as an image, went back to the original level, projected the UVs along the vertical axis (which took me ages to find out how), tweaked the UVs for some time until I realized I needed to make the verical polygons not quite so vertical if I was to use "straight from the top projection", which meant I had to redo all the steps apart from creating a palm leaf texture. Also mapping textures sucks ass in Maya. I wanted to map a bricks texture onto some walls, which took me hours. Then when I got that right, I had to tweak the directional light source angle a few iterations to match that in the game.
So no, I'm not very fond of Maya. I've regretted for some time that I didn't go with 3DSMAX which I even knew a little beforehand. I figured Maya might give me better leverage, but in this pace it's going to take ages.
Nonetheless I still think the high score, if anything, will be the pinnacle of the game. A funny feeling, as I worked so hard with the "gamy" things.
Now I'm going to teach the AI to go by elevators. Being a physical simulation, that will probably pose a challenge. This is the last risk of this game, but if I can't get it working good enough but best I'll rethink the level design. Oh, and I tried running it on the iPhone and that is working just fine with all those sound sources and moving physical objects. I have to get an iPad. Just have to convince my significant other first...
