Projects Of Matthew Di Mare Miller

I’ve realized I’m very inconsistent with updating this site.
Things have been busy at my day job and in the evenings I usually prefer unwinding by gaming with friends.

Recently though I’ve been thinking about how just doing a little bit of side project work a day would greatly improve my portfolio. I’ve also been playing a lot of solo Everquest 2 for some reason. So the result is I’ve started work on a new project. I’m planning to make a MMORPG type game. I’m debating about the MMO part of it. I want it to play like an MMORPG because that’s the most familiar genre for me, but I don’t want to make the same design sacrifices that games like WoW make because they have to balance the game for all players. I think there’s a lot of room for interesting quest design if you don’t have to worry about the typical issues that arise when designing for many concurrent players.

Anyway my intention is to not get too ahead of myself in planning the design of this game. I’m going to take it one piece at a time starting with the controls.

This is the result of two days of casual work. The camera yaw matches the player mesh’s rotation when running around with WASD, when holding left mouse the camera boom can be moved by the player while staying focused on the player mesh. When holding right mouse the camera is now in control of rotating the player mesh. Changing relative direction based on which input mode the player is doing is kind of tricky. Especially when you have to also factor in the strafe (Q & E) and turn buttons and how those are also affected with and without the different mouse controls. Zooming with mouse wheel was probably the simplest step. Also I found some starter animations that I was able to map to my system so that the player kind of has a strafe animation, moving forward left and back right looks awkward but I think I might be able to correct that by taking the lower half animation and flipping it so the legs are moving the opposite way.

Next I’m going to get clickable target objects working. They will have a highlight of some sort under them to show they’re targeted. Afterwards I think it’s a good time to start working on unit frames and hotbars. Will update this more often as it progresses!