Dev Log for May 2024, Week 19:
Monday:
Man I’m apparently having a day. I’ve been going in so many circles with Reddit that I’m about to just call the whole thing off with them. I haven’t been able to post anywhere and when I tried to create a sub it was instantly banned. I get the whole shadow ban thing, but this is a fresh account created specifically for game dev stuff. Like most things social, this is wildly frustrating.
Tuesday:
I was off on other things during the day, but was able to get some stuff done in the evening. I’d previously started work on adding more movement options to the player decks, which I got back to tonight. I was able to get the deck spin move up and running, and am researching combining a tween with trigger access strength. I think it’s going to add some dope movement options to the game. It is creating some interesting interactions with the ball physics though. While I like some of the interactions, I don’t understand all of why it’s happening, so that will be some research.
Trinaught got a hold of me tonight too. He’s pretty much ready to go, so I sent him a link to my Obsidian vault with all the info in it. It’s going to be wild having both of us on this thing, it has me thinking about Kickstarter and what actually launching this would be like.
I know that’s not the original plan, but then again neither was this game. I know better than to try and plan too much though, so I’m trying to stay rooted and just focus on getting better at all this.
Still though, awesome to be working on something with him.
Wednesday:
I got into the project after getting some convention art done in the morning. Slowly getting back into my gym and diet routine too, which I’m happy about.
I kind of did a “Two steps forward, one step back” thing today. My mission was to get deck turning with the trigger buttons up and running, Which I did. I thought I was going to use a tween to get it done, but in researching it I stumbled upon lerp_angle(). I was able to feed that the trigger strength to control the deck rotation, which worked awesome.
The downside is it created all kinds of weird behavior with yesterdays deck flip stuff. The happy accident is that I realized I could essentially bake both behaviors into the new function. It felt like cheating a little because I didn’t really solve the programming problem per say, but I also don’t want to fall into a hole when this is all stuff I can come back to after the broad strokes are in. I’ve made sure to comment in the code what I would like to see happen.
Even with how hectic everything is, I’m excited to be finding my groove with this. it feels like it’s been weird getting started on this one with everything else going on.
I’m feeling much better about programming in general too, which I think comes from getting more familiar with the code base, I know this for damn sure: I do not waste time on watching engine comparisons anymore.
Okay, it’s about 10:00p.m. for me, I think I might actually play a game for a little bit tonight.
Thursday – Sunday:
Well the rest of the week went a whole different direction. I was able to work on a few things here and there, but progress was slow. Trinaught hit some bumps as well, mostly on a count of his rig going down hard on him.
So how did it go:
This week was off in almost every way imaginable, none of it in a way I could’ve guessed. Shit goes that way sometimes apparently.