Dev Log for May 2024, Week 21 & 22:

Monday:

Pour one out for the homies, I hope to gaze upon that beautiful Godot editor one day soon…

Tuesday:

Well, it was towards the end of the evening, but I was able to get something done. I’ve been working on building a database of player info based off of the initially connected controllers, which I think is off to a decent start? I’m going to try and touch base with Trinaught when I have something more to show for it. This wasn’t the level of effort I was hoping to get in, but I’ll take a day late over a week at this point.
I’m going to attempt to slash through some of the side project stuff a little quicker so I can get back to this, right now I’m in that black hole zone where it feels like none of it is getting done because I’m chipping away in so many different directions.
The end of this week has me helping my friends move out of town. I’m not thrilled they’re leaving, but I’m happy for them. That one is the last side project that has nothing to do with either the game or the conference, so at the very least it will be a little bit of time back during all of this crazy. With summer starting up I’ll be hitting the water that Sunday to hopefully unwind a little, and kick start a mildly overdue return to physical activity.

Wednesday:

I was able to plug away some more at it tonight too! I got the data storage for the players where I want it for now, at least until something pops up to prove me wrong. It was a great learning experience for loops and dictionaries, I’m far less put off by them now. I sent Trinaught a sample of the code I was working on too, he didn’t have anything bad to say about it. I gave him his rightful props for walking me through arrays and loops when I was out there, it paid off here for sure.
As an added bonus, I finished the six base decks (paddles for hitting the packet (the ball)) finished up too. I’m sure these will take some adjusting over time, but they are usable enough for me to start on the character select screens. I’m hoping to get that going tomorrow if possible. I may play hooky from convention stuff to get it going.

Thursday through Next-F#cking-Thursday (What the hell?):

Man, I’d love to say I knew where the time went, but I’d be making shit up if I did. In my defense, we did have Memorial Day, which usually includes some mandatory lake time. Considering everything going on… I wasn’t going to refuse. I did get some programming and asset work in, but as you’ll see in the Friday entry, it was an exercise in learning more than it was progress on the game.
I’m concerned with getting this dev log turned in late, mostly because I don’t want this to set a trend. Currently I find myself in an odd shitstorm of productivity, with some days seeing me do 48 hours’ worth of work, and other days seeing me glued to whatever show I’ve found on my lunch break and couldn’t pull away from.
I would like one thing on the record: None of this reflects my motivation for the game. This weird half-in schedule, all the missed beats… it’s all the fulfillment of promises made on the way out the door. I’m not making any new ones.

Friday:

Okay so I think I did something every programmer does at some point, and even funnier, something Trinaught just got done warning me against. I fell into an over-optimization hole, so fresh off the heels of getting controllers dynamically assigned, I just decided I was good enough to make everything dynamic and assign everything that way, and build all the element dynamically and… I’m not there yet.
So, while this was a good learning experience, and it really was, I learned more about data structures and working with file systems within Godot, I scrapped the code (which in itself was a learning experience, I could’ve thrown it in a commit for later review). ultimately it hit me that I was taking five times as long to build a character select system that will dynamically handle more characters that I will ever make for this game.

Saturday:

So, I went back to coding dirty as shit, got all the functionality back up and then some. Took an afternoon. So now you can go through and pick a character and deck, which gets stored in the player manager, which will then populate the level. I’ll need to take some time to finesse this for local two player, but that shouldn’t be too hard.
And this rounds me back to what Trinaught said, just get it working first, then clean it up. I’m not sure why I chose violence with this specific feature, but in a way I’m glad I did. I think I was always going to make this mistake, so better to learn it on something contained, and easy to walk back.

So how did it go:

If you read through this. I think we both know the answer was always going to be terrible. But it’s not the games fault. I need to get more consistent at saying no to things and try to cement in that’s it’s almost always going to be better to put effort into things I have more control over than not. I’m fine with doing this shuffle one more time, but it’s obvious I don’t have the cycles to do it like this anymore. All of that is to say that I would’ve been much happier working on the game this whole time instead of splitting my attention like it is. Two more months.