If you’re here, you might’ve found me on socials. but based on how brittle those are looking at the moment I’m guessing you found this on Itch.io, or my game page. If you are coming from the future though, maybe this whole game dev thing panned out?
In either case, welcome! At this point in the show, I’ve gotten one small toy/game developed and out to the public. I’m currently working on getting the business stuff set up, along with all the social presence jazz (like this), and most importantly working on my second development project. This is the first in an ongoing series of dev logs, which will cover game dev, business dev and marketing dev. I’ll be covering things daily as they happen, then posting at the end of the week. We’ll see how that goes.
Just try to remember, I’m new at this, have little to no clue what I’m doing, and probably have a tendency to overshare. With all that out of the way, lets hit it!
Dev Log for Mar Week 14, 2024:
Lofty Goal of the Week:
Look between you and me, I’ll be happy if I can get this done and posted in a reasonable timeframe. I mean it would be nice to have the next project started in some way that isn’t just creating the project in Godot, but life be getting crazy like that right about now. Oh, I wouldn’t mind having the last of the business salsa done too, that stuff is annoying.
Monday:
So I got started on the work for deck and balls (the 5 yr. old in me loves that title, rest of me advised against even typing it in here), mostly just setting the project up and re-teaching myself how to do multiple ssh’s off of one machine. I’m a little salty over it too. It took WAY too long to get all that set up, ended up having to use a PAT key to get it working, which was a first (I should probably mention this was to get it working with the Godot version control plugin, which is awesome).
So I go through all that, but then the commits are being logged as coming from my other git account?! I wasn’t thrilled with that one bit. But I did get everything working, so now I can start plugging away at it once I have a couple of other things in order.
On the business side of things, I put in the application for the business account, so once that goes through, I’m about as official as I need to be, just need to make more games!
Tuesday:
Ended up helping my friend pack for most of the day (practically an out of state move, sad to see them go). I did hear back from the state on some paperwork I filed earlier. I got approved for my tradename, which means I can use Bad Milk Robot without the LLC! In less awesome news, I did not get approved for the trademark. Based on what they told me, I need to be more technical in the description, and not try and group alternates in with it. It’s late now, so I will be hitting that in the morning after the gym.
Oh one last bit of news. Everything came back good on the business account, so I got all that linked up and deposited the initial balance. That made all of this seem pretty real. Now when I have a free minute I’ll do some digging on what kind of grants AZ might be throwing around. That won’t be any time soon though, I still got a pile of shit to get done in the mean time.
Wednesday:
Okay so first up handling the trademark thing. While I’m at it, I will do a minor adjustment on the font since I noticed something I was less than happy with. Then I’ll look up some examples as well as their rejection notes.
After fixing everything and looking everything up, I thought I had my shit in order. Should’ve remembered I was dealing with government. So I think what I’m starting is the process for a state acknowledged trademark, but I could be wrong. Did you know you can use ™ on your logo without having to do shit? For real. You only need to file for the ® symbol. I’m sure both of these are going to be effective at stopping piracy.
Okay with that out of the way. I’m gonna see if I can get anything done in Godot.
Follow-up: That shit didn’t happen. We’ll see you bright and early tomorrow my friend.
Thursday:
I got woken up earlier than normal this morning by a support call from my old gig. I need to change that. On the upside, I was able to get a leisurely start on the day. Downside? A massive omelet almost put me back to sleep.
But after all that I did manage to get enough placeholder art to start laying down the groundwork for the game:
Okay, so I was able to get the project set up, with the main stage built and one of the paddles working. Here comes the rub. the physics engine is weird. And by that, I mean I probably don’t fully understand the physics engine. So after beating my head against the IDE for a while, and then falling down a CoPilot lead hole in the Godot documentation… I’m at a local watering hole to update this and smell some grass beer in the hopes that it shakes something loose. I think the pain point on this is that I really want to use the physics stuff instead of rolling my own. Rolling my own would be simpler in this case since it’s a relatively easy use-case (Essentially Pong), but that’s not the point of this specific learning adventure.
Friday:
Not gonna lie, I’m feeling like I bit off a bit more than I thought by deciding to go with the physics stuff. It’s not so much that it’s scaring me off, I just thought it would be more like what I’ve done in the past, which I guess would defeat the purpose. Oh well though, this will be interesting for sure so I’m not backing down. Integrated_forces, here I come!
It was interesting being on my pair programming jam session while trying to figure this stuff out. It makes me wonder what streaming this will be like. I’m aware that from a marketing perspective it’s something I’ll have to get comfortable with at some point, but I will probably put it off for a good long while before I take that plunge. Oh before I forget, here’s a snap shot of where it’s at with all the pieces put together so far:
I want to build it in a way that I can easily modulate the colors via code. For this chunk of the game I think I’ll be able to get some cool effects off that technique in the long run.
Saturday:
This was my chill day. I ended up making chicken bacon ranch air-fried chimichangas for me and some of the fam. We all went a little too hard on the grub and then chilled for Parasyte: The Gray. That shows pretty good. Not much really to talk about here, except the physics thing is still bothering me a bit. But that’s a tomorrow Doc problem.
Sunday:
Man I got a late start, like 9 p.m. late. I beat my head against the problem for a while until I finally waved the white flag and watched a tutorial:
Beginner Godot Tutorial – How to Make Pong with AI (Coding with Russ)
I’ll spend some time tomorrow reviewing it to make sure it all sinks in. The big takeaway from this for me was realizing that I need to be a little looser with how I get this stuff done. In my head, it wasn’t a physics solution unless I was able to manage it with all the toggles in the editor, which is not the case. I got there because I was actually able to get 90% of it going without having to touch code, so I thought I was missing something.
It’s a high note though, so I’ll take it.
So how did it go:
If I look at the lofty goal of the week, I’m feeling… okay about things.
It looks like I should have this posted shortly, so that’s good. The business stuff is about as handled as it can be. I should have the business card in soon, and all I can really do on the trademark is wait. So that leaves the big one:
How did the game stuff go?
I think it went decent… ish. Okay so here’s the thing. I did in fact get it started, and I got some progress in on the actual design of it, as well as the learning front. I do think I could do more though. This last week, the last few actually, have been victims of poor execution. I’m just not sticking to my own timetables.
Now not all of that is me screwing off, but in my own time I could probably be adhering to my own reasonable schedule better than I am. So the fix? I mean the answer is just do it, right?
Summer is usually the time for me to bang out all of the indoors stuff, since my area gets prohibitively hot. So with the exception of hitting the river every other weekend, you just don’t want to go outside. So that will leave me with getting ready for Def Con this year, and making games. I think my overall goal will be to have stuff to show off at Def Con, so if I can nail that, I’ll be pretty happy.
Okay, see you in the next one!