Oh well. The WaveFront (.obj) file format looked ideal yesterday; simple, straight-forward, ASCII-based.. but it doesn’t support object hierarchies, which pretty much limits its utility for me. It means that if I wanted to create a character with multiple joints, I can’t build them all together and make a single export; I’d have to build each piece separately, centered on the world origin, and then manually piece them back together again in code.

It’s too bad.. other than that, WaveFront supported everything I wanted, including both polygon and vector definitions, basic materials, etc.

I still like the dinner party idea, but I’m now thinking that it’s a little too ambitious to realise this week; there’s too much engine work that would be required to put it together well (primarily to do with writing an importer to actually get data into the game). I’ll come back to it later on. Perhaps as ‘Game in a Week #4’, or something.

So I’m now back to thinking about the other possible game topics, clouds especially. I have this vague notion about slamming clouds together to make them rain.. but don’t really know whether you’d do this using a “pool”-style interface, or by flying a plane around and shooting them with little bullets to push them around, or whether there’s some other method to use.. and I don’t have a very strong idea about why you’d want the clouds to rain, exactly. Perhaps the goal of each level is to make all the clouds give up all their water. Could call the game “Drought Relief” or somesuch.

But I’m not really convinced by that idea; I’m going to have to keep mulling it over, and hope to come up with something brilliant in the next day or two.