So if I had a reader, I imagined not putting up a dev log in 2.5 months solved that problem. Well this all did start as a learning journey, and in that regard it’s been a solid win. In terms of pushing something closer to production… well, the roads, they do wind. Anyways this sounds like an obituary when it’s not, so I’ll meander on over to the point.
What happened man?
Around mid October, when working on the VTT, I realized a few things. Primarily, that I had repeated the age old mistake of learning a little game dev, then immediately moved on to my massive multiplayer project. I tried convincing myself that it wasn’t, but it was. Thankfully similar experience in scope creeping in other, finished projects provided me enough perspective to see this, but that also meant coming to a halt. The primary reason for this is I would run out of money before I had anything to show strangers.
Game Dev is Hard…
After that I honestly didn’t know what to do. I thought me and a friend were going to pick up a previous project, and I was hyped over that for a minute, but after an initial meetup, I produced a couple of commits and didn’t see anything else for a while. This set me down a weird mental road where the idea itself just kind of lost the spark. To be clear, I mean the idea of that particular game, not game dev.
I wish I had a follow up on how I took a week, re-grouped, then hit it hard. But the reality is I wasn’t sure what to do, so there is a giant hole in November where my productivity used to be,
I wasn’t doing nothing, but it was like a weird mix of busy work and doing a year end review. I learned some lessons in there though, like GitHub doesn’t count commits to anything other than the Main branch to your commit graph. This freaked me out when I looked at it and thought I had done far less than I did (I spent about a month working in branches).
I also learned I need to take my playtesting sessions more seriously. I had a friend comment on what was a problem in my game, to which I had apparently noted at the time: He just isn’t a platform cat. That was very dumb of me.
Around mid November, a buddy of mine that’s real big into AI got me on a discord call to show me his homebrew server. It was wildly impressive… and then he had it spit out some code.
I’m not going to lie the shit was unreal. He was prompting for some wild shit too, since he can run uncensored models on his own rig. Then he asked me for one of my Godot projects, so I sent him some source code. We then had it go through the project, find bugs and show where things could be improved. In maybe 5 seconds it generated a document outlining everything which code suggestions and all.
It definitely had problems, GDscript not being a massively adopted engine yet, but it looked promising enough that I considered building my own rig. After weighing the time and effort, I opted to try GitHub Copilot instead, to test and see how it actually would go.
After some fuckery getting VScode setup and talking with Godot, I was in and butchering code like no other. After running amuck with it as a toy, I took some time to think about how I would use it as a tool, and this is what I settled on:
- I write my own code first, only asking it things if I’m totally lost or mainly, when I forget what a specific function is called.
- If I’m working on a larger system, I’ll ask it what strategy it would use, to see if there is a standard way of doing something I don’t yet know about. This helped build a re-usable state machine for example, as well as set it up in a drag and droppable way so I never have to rebuild it from scratch.
- I’ll use is for code review and re-factoring after I’ve written a large pile of stuff. this almost always helps to trim the fat, which is keeping everything super readable for me.
So in all, I think I’m pro AI in the sense that’s it’s an amazing search engine and auto-complete tool, I’m just not letting it take the wheel completely anytime soon.
What happens now?
I considering the last couple of months a stumble, not a fall. Being fully aware I forgot which pocket I left my motivation in, that was all just a side mission in finding the pocket, which I did. I think setting up the company LLC messed up my perspective a little, and scope creep twisted it further. So, I’m going back to basics: Make something I think is cool, get it online, and hope people mess with it. I’ll be doing all of this with the express purpose of getting better at all this game dev stuff, and if after all that I find something worth publishing, then I get to rationalize buying that Steam Deck… for development purposes.
That being said I’ve been working on stuff the past month, so should have some screens in the next dev log. See you in the next one!