Day 0: Starting Up

This is an effort to discipline myself by making the process of developing a game more accountable and transparent. I shall strive for daily updates that show progress made on the game I am currently developing. The game has been in development for a few months now, and development often slips. Although we have no formal deadlines, this cannot go on. Arbitrarily I hope to be done with this in two months time.

Today I started importing our character animation files into the Unity game engine. Each animation for each character (3 characters in total) was given to me in a separate Maya file. A problem I ran into was that the animator had changed the name of the objects in the scene for some files by adding a prefix on every single bone and mesh. When imported into Unity, the base mesh would not play these animations because the prefix caused a name mismatch. Maya provides a tool for finding and replacing strings in object names, but this failed to function as intended so I had to search for a third party script. Odd that such an expensive software lacks a function that simple notepad provides. The script I found, written by Rod Green, is excellent, along with his entire blog: Maya Renaming Objects Script. With that solved I can move onto the next inevitable headache.