Dev Log for Apr 2024, Week 17:

Lofty Goal:

This is getting put on hold until I can guarantee myself the space for it.

Monday:

Off to a pretty good start! I was able to get started a little earlier than usual. At the time of this writing, I’ve gotten the ball mechanics successfully converted into a class, with error reporting and speed limiters. I’m going to work on trying to give the paddles the same treatment, as well as getting the inputs in place.
Man I actually made some good progress today:

• I was able to get the decks (paddles) into their own class.
• I managed to finally get a smooth transition for in-game ball acceleration, with no bugs.
• Cleaned up some of the UI elements that were not behaving correctly.
• Got some balance issues resolved.
  I could find some things to be mad about if I tried. This Monday isn’t going to be one of them.
  Just to touch base: It’s 11:30 at night and I just got the dumbest rejection for my trademark ever. I’ll get into it tomorrow I’m sure.

Tuesday/Wednesday:

These went to the wind in terms of game development. I think I’m finding my groove with this project, it’s just a little slow going with everything going on right now.
Oh I did get the trademark re-filed. Apparently I applied under the wrong type of LLC? And they locked me out of the site I was using because reasons. So I had to track down a bit of the info all over again.

Thursday:

So I managed to get scoring implemented, as well as a few more of the basic features. Work on getting the bigger chunks into classes is going well too. It’s not great progress at the moment but I’ll take any progress before I leave for my trip. I’m visiting a friend of mine who’s a bad-ass full-stack developer (Who also turned me on to programming), so I’m going to have him look through some of my code and see where I can improve.

Friday/Saturday/Sunday:

This was a great weekend, got to see one of my oldest friends, who like I said previously, is also like a mentor with all this programming jazz. In the Def Con circles, he goes by Trinaught, so I’ll keep up the trend.
While most of the time was hanging out, and arguably too much awesome food, we did get down on some code review. I gotta say I left the experience pretty happy. As it turns out, while I’m still green as shit and have plenty of room to improve, there didn’t seem to be anything that was an outright knock against the last project and the current one. He broke down some things I had been struggling with and we talked about some of what goes into thinking like a developer.
He even wants to help with this new project, which I’m all about. We did some pair programming one of the days to lay the groundwork for local multiplayer and building out the selectable character resources. We hit a few snags between him not having a dev environment set up yet and me being some weird combination of new and nervous (Which I know is true because as I was walking him through my code I did that shit were you say “Umm” about a thousand times.), but it set the groundwork for me to be able to clean it up once I got back home (I’m writing this a week into the future btw).
So now if we end up with more than one player, the game can dynamically assign controllers to each player without having to add the same set of actions to the input map over and over again for each player.

So how did it go:

The week was good and fast, though I don’t really recall much of it. This one was about the weekend for sure.
It was wild seeing the obvious difference in experience between me and Trinaught (He’s been at this almost 25 years). While Trinaught turned me on to Godot, he actually hasn’t used it much previously. At this point I have way more experience than him in the engine. That being said, he was able to immediately jump in and start solving problems. Sure, he’d ask where something was in the editor, or what Godot’s version of a concept was. But once he knew whatever that was, he was able to jump right in and implement. It was great being able to pick his brain on the why and how, the dude is awesome with explaining things, and patient about me needing to hear it a few different ways before it sinks in.
I’m really looking forward to working with him on this, it was honestly supposed to be this way from the start, things just always seemed to pop up. But with me leaving my job and thing’s getting smoother at his, we might actually have the time to get something built now.