Continuing on from my Tokkitron announcement last month, I did a new game jam project called Cult of Taal-zuz! I swear it’s just a coincidence that I’ve done two game jams in quick succession, and I’m not just planning to keep doing game jams forever. However for a while I’ve been wanting to make a lightweight management (or “tycoon”) game, and I saw another game jam that was a good excuse to finally make one.
Continue reading “Cult of Taal-zuz: a simple management sim”Introducing Tokkitron with Dungeon Crawler jam
I just submitted my entry in this year’s dungeon crawler jam: Uliel’s Quest. And you may notice that it’s not on my main account, but rather a new account I started for my new brand:
Procedural geometry in Godot
As another part of my Godot explorations, I’ve learned how to generate meshes. My goal was essentially to port over my dungeon generation code from Unity, what I explained in detail in this tutorial I wrote years ago. Now I’ll explain how to do the same thing in Godot!
Software Renderer in Unity
As a somewhat random learning exercise, I picked up the book Computer Graphics from Scratch to see if it was any good. The title by itself is rather vague, but the subtitle “A Programmer’s Introduction to 3D Rendering” makes it clear this is up my alley. This tweet is from a few days after I started:
Godot Explorations
As implied by my post last month, I’ve been testing out Godot as another development option. I’ve been finding pros that were both unexpected (at least to me) while the cons are being addressed. On the other hand, after they partially walked back their unwelcome new fees, I think I’m going to keep using Unity for my next hobby game.
Continue reading “Godot Explorations”Decoupled (pub-sub) messaging system in Godot
This is an explanation for how to make a decoupled messaging system using the built-in “signals” mechanism. I just started learning GDScript to do programming in Godot, and it isn’t taking me long at all. I quickly realized “signals” are a nice way of handling events, but have the downside that the object receiving events needs to know about the object that sends events. This level of coupling is fine in many situations, but a truly decoupled system (where neither the sender nor receiver know about each other) would often be even better, so I devised this simple approach to doing that.
At a high-level, you make a script with a list of your signals in it, and then set that script to Autoload (making sure Global Variable is enabled, to get the convenient variable name). In other words, something like this in the Project Settings:
Possible remake of my first commercial game?
I almost forgot to post this month, which seems like a sign that this blog is running out of steam after all these years. I won’t be shocked if I start forgetting a month here or there.
Anyway, just this morning I noticed a Halloween asset pack from Kenney, which reminded me of my very first commercial game. I might take his pack (and maybe this one too) to remake Halloween Hijinks.
Continue reading “Possible remake of my first commercial game?”New Game Engine Options
The last couple weeks have seen a lot of brouhaha around Unity’s proposed runtime fee. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then read this, but long story short the changes left a bad taste in mouths across the game industry, including mine. This is making me investigate new options to use for developing personal projects.
Continue reading “New Game Engine Options”Book Review/Analysis: Seveneves
I recently read the book Seveneves, so here I am talking about it! Long story short, it’s a good sci-fi book that I recommend. Specifically, it’s a hard science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Be warned that it is a very looong book; given both its length and that the narrative has a big shift before the last third, it kinda feels like a trilogy collected into one binding. There are no aliens or advanced tech in the first two-thirds, which makes sense since the setting is very near future. However then there’s a huge time jump, and the book picks up again 5,000 years in the future.
So again, it’s a good book that I recommend for sci-fi fans. The rest of this post has discussion of specific plot points, so SPOILER WARNING
Continue reading “Book Review/Analysis: Seveneves”New Character UI
I’ve been doing a lot of under-the-hood code work for implementing character stats and rules and such. However the main visible thing I did recently was this popup window when the player starts a game:
newArteest developments 