Dev Log for Apr 2024, Week 15:

Lofty Goal of the Week:

This week is going to be short for me, as I have a trip to California planned for Friday through Monday. That being what it is, I’m going to focus on getting the Pong portion of the game in better shape, and start poking at networking. Normally I wouldn’t put multiplayer on the “second game ever” feature list, but I’m hoping it won’t be too much of a monster since the concept is small, we’ll see how that escalates.

Monday:

These are usually the “take care of the left-overs” day. As such, I worked on getting the last post up, un-screwing some issues I had with brand socials, and finally using those socials to tell people about the post. I got a decent amount of other stuff done, but I’ll leave the normie chocolate out of the game dev peanut butter.
I’m beginning to feel the approach of an impasse, but one of the good kinds I think? Hear me out: Since the start of this “I’m going to make games” project, I’ve kind of been ramming through it bit by bit, but in a reactionary state.
Itch.io needed business info for me to be able to charge money for things. Now that’s nowhere near close, but it did occur to me to get it out of the way sooner rather than later.
All the socials wanted to know what my website was, so I built a barebones site to get people too.
While not fully implemented yet, I’ve been working on some marketing stuff, and making sure to think more with that in mind as I do things.
But I’ve been approaching all of it with the mentality of getting placeholders in all of these holes, which I kind of have?
Now I feel the stage approaching where I’ll have to spend some time on each of these areas to get them polished. It’s a weird sense of dread and excitement. Up to this point, I’ve been able to do things quickly because I knew it wasn’t the final product, hell, I’m even approaching the actual game dev stuff like that now too, which makes sense since I’m still learning. I think all I’m saying is it’s going to be interesting to see what things look like in a few months.

Tuesday:

Ooooo I’ve about had it with Meta. My hardest socials to get squared away were Insta and Threads. I mostly just wanted to claim them so they wouldn’t get taken by anyone else. After like a week I was finally able to use them. I put up one post on threads for a dev log, and they hit me with a suspension. I’m pretty over them.
I’ve started building out additional logic for streamlining how velocity is added to the ball after it collides with player paddles. I got some other small touch-ups done as well, until later in the evening when a friend that I haven’t seen in like 6 months dropped by. I caught him up on all the recent changes in my life, including this whole game dev thing.
This exposed an interesting problem I’ve been having: I think there is a part of my brain that is stuck in the early days of “game dev is hard” mode. I will catch myself putting off opening the editor in the morning, which I did in the beginning sometimes when I was learning everything. While I’m not a great (or even competent) programmer, I’ve cleared the hurdle where everything is Greek and really enjoy getting into it once I start. So it’s literally a disconnected behavior pattern. I’m going to adjust my morning routine to get that handled.

Wednesday:

So I use a split keyboard, which is awesome and has saved my hands. Right up until it isn’t awesome, fucks up, and ruins my day. I’m fixing my keyboard.

Thursday:

I found out that my window installers will be here next Tuesday, which throws a wrench in my California visit. So that’s been rescheduled. I honestly spent today completely off the rails. I am not proud. I guess days like this are going to happen every now and again? I should put a stop to that.

Friday:

Today was a busy one. I got some parts ordered for the keyboard, and printed a case for the backup, so that’s all resolved for now. I’ve been making progress on the game, though it seems like it’s going in reverse slightly. I guess you could call this the debug session. I had a bunch of logic in different spots to handle keeping momentum constant, while also checking collisions. I’ve reversed the course on that slightly, in an attempt to break that all up, and verify that it’s working as intended (hint, it wasn’t before). With that done, I can essentially go back and get it all working correctly. With that out of the way, I should be freed up to finish that game loop (so getting the scoring implemented, and start building out the required screens). That will finally free me up for the big boi, networking it all!

Saturday:

As part of my morning routine, I saw this video:
The Slow Poison of Endless Fantasy
I think a lot of people could relate to that, I know I can. It occurs to me that I have a slightly different problem currently though:
I have too many balls in the air. I told my old job I would be around for emergency stuff and housekeeping. Well that also includes the work we do for Def Con, which is coming fast. So I have all that prep, with the addition of digital displays I’ll be building, badge work and a whole slew of other stuff.
I think what that video triggered in me is I will probably need a more “Hit the ground running” approach to all this stuff if I’m going to successfully get it all knocked down.

Sunday:

After looking at all the code, and some of the problems I was hitting with holding last touched variables and some other things, I think my next move is a re-factor. I’m going with this logic based on how sloppy I got all of this together initially. Honestly I was planning on this anyways so I could get to practicing on building classes and my own nodes anyways, so really this is the best thing to do, at the best time (Also I’ve been repeating myself in the code base already out of laziness).
To that effort, I started cleaning up all the little half implementations across the code. from here I can take everything I know works, then get it all better organized and future-proofed.

So how did it go:

It’s a mixed bag. I’m not super thrilled with productivity this week, between the keyboard fiasco and me getting in my own way. While I might’ve had a few down moments during the week, I think I got out of most of them just fine. I think there are some valuable lessons to pull from the week though, which as long as I act on them, should help going forward. There is also the shadow of the con that’s about 4 months out, so that will be chipping away at my time too. On the upside, I’m still learning more about Godot and programming, which is awesome for me. And I still find something new and interesting to dig into at every corner. I think all I’m saying is I’m still very happy with my decision.