Been a minute, sorry about that. So, it’s been a wild couple of months, but productive. After taking a step back from the “gotta ship” mentality, I felt a little out at sea, which was a kind of continuation of where I left off in January. Thankfully I found my bearings again.
AI is the future and I’m a vibe coder now.
I’m not, I just heard about it and think it’s a little silly. In my view, it seems to be on the other end of what using AI should be, but I’m not enough of a programmer yet to have an opinion with weight on it I don’t think. On that note though, I’ve been hitting my stride with it, and that stride seems to mean using it less.
I like using it as a learning tool, or that thing that replaces StackOverflow. I get answers quicker when I remember to ask, and the claude models seem to be pretty good at explaining things. Nothings really changed on that end though, so I won’t spend too much time talking about it. Oh, I have been asking it to grade my code though, and it seems to be of the mind that I’m an intermediate programmer now. I’m not sure my full stack friends would agree with it, but I’ll at least take it as a step in the right direction.
Shiny new nodes
As part of the learning journey I’ve been getting into building custom nodes and trying my hand at plugin building. Right now it’s all aimed at building stuff I don’t want to do from scratch ever again. I think this started with the state machine from a while back. Since then I’ve been working on a camera controller for moving a map around, a data parser and some utility stuff for displaying text. While I’m not actively working on the VTT, it’s hard to ignore that a lot of the tooling seems to be geared towards that.
Side projects
I’ve also been working on a couple of small projects. Firstly, I wanted to re-create an old project I essentially started learning on in Gamemaker 2 back in the day. I worked on it over a one week vacation at the time and really enjoyed it. It’s essentially the Mario Bros one-up mechanic where you keep jumping on enemies, with a splash of the floor is lave. Here’s a screen:
I’ve also been working on a threat display system for a friend as a group project (Where I started building the custom map camera actually), which is interesting because it marks the first time I’m working with data coming from outside of Godot. JSON parsing was a new one for me, but thankfully it was pretty straightforward thanks to the engine.
That project actually got me out of that mini hump I was talking about earlier, which really helped put things in perspective. It’s interesting to work on something random and have that be the thing that helps show yourself the progress you’ve made. I was surprised how quickly I was able to get the code up and functional for it. Nothing is pretty yet, but I was able to “prove it out” quickly, which was awesome.
Business Stuff
So once I got away from the idea of “full steam ahead-ing” to a release, which I still think is the right move, I had to deal with the reality that my savings no longer had a path to re-filling. I didn’t want to go back to employment after going through all the trouble of setting up the business after all. So I did the next best thing: I started consulting.
So now I have a client I do sub-part-time work for designing graphics and eventually some programming work.
All cards on the table… It’s my old place of employment. I started with them as a consultant almost a decade ago, so in a sense we just rolled back to an earlier commit. Thankfully my old boss/new client, on top of being my friend outside of this, is also about people. If I’m being real, I had doubts that he would want to go for it at first, but he was all about the idea of being able to continue working together and doing it in a way that was in both our best interests.
So while this wasn’t how I planned on making everything “legit”, I’m here all the same. Currently I’m able to balance getting my clients stuff done and still have plenty of time in front of Godot, which I’m in the process of increasing as we speak.
Closing Thoughts:
All in all I’m glad I slowed down a bit, even if it wasn’t the original intention. After going in all directions for a bit, I think I have a route ahead: I’ll keep doing interesting smaller projects to learn, so long as what I’m learning can be used in my “main” project. If there was a misstep here, it’s that for a short time I wasn’t doing that.
With the business up for renewal in about a month, I wonder if I should do a year end to see if there’s some lessons in there (I’m sure there are) that I can take forward?
But thinking ahead, I want to focus on getting better at all these new skills, and incorporating them into something I’m proud of, and more importantly, that people dig.
Okay I think that’s it for me, I’ll make a solid point of updating more than every three months from here on out. Until next time!