TOE week 16: Diagonal Legos!

                Diagonal Legos! They are a thing. Last week I tried to use the Pythagorean Theorem to solve a problem and as it turns out the Pythagorean Theorem was exactly why it wouldn’t work. “Wat?” I know right! Last week I was basically trying to make a 1x1 triangle have a hypotenuse of 1. Not possible in this dimension anyway. So it doesn’t work. However what does work is my wife’s solution of parallelograms. They are the Diagonal Legos I have been looking for. Parallelograms line up on the grid! All of this week’s work has been done in Blender making various different collision pieces and lining them up. I did finally get a drawing tablet so I can paint better in photoshop. But the actual painting has still yet to happen. Baby steps right? 

                I guess you might be wondering just why am I doing this? I am trying to work smarter and not harder. I’ve worked on a game like this before and the Level Designers made A LOT of work for the artists by creating levels with no standard sized collision out of boxes of various dimensions. Using this Diagonal Legos system that I have been forced to focus on over the past two weeks, I can make standardized art that works across all levels. In industry MANY a time when I brought up work flow issues I was met with rolled eyes. I fought with some producers about ‘if you make us do X, it will cost us Y’. One time it was an entire level. Content creation is the name of the game. If you can make content easily you can make MORE of it.

                Being the only person currently working on this allows me to spend time on the ease of use of my tools. I don’t yet know the drawback to my Diagonal Legos but I am assuming it is computationally more expensive than box colliders. In my opinion the ease of use out weights this. It was a pretty good week for work overall. Not really a whole a lot to say really aside from Diagonal Legos ROCK!