Time: 23:18
Got the map laid out and train running! Feels solid.
Tomorrow I iron out details. Some sprites are off-center. Also will add some sound effects (and look into automating deploy of commits).
Day 196
Time: 40:56
Worked through three things from the Picozine today.
Code – Today I learned Lua’s array indexes start at 1. It feels so wrong. *shudder*
This tutorial’s code is complicated, but I parsed it and it makes sense. It moves sprites around the screen.
Sprites – Started recreating the tutorial sprites. Much easier after doing the Megaman sprites in an earlier project. 🙂
Map – Began building the game map by arranging sprites on the screen. Interesting grid system. Simple, but not used to it.
Detour! When I started this blog, I wanted the results of each day to be playable by the audience. I will spend some time over the next few days looking into doing/automating this.
Tomorrow: Continue tutorial and look into playable commit idea.
Day 195
Coughing up my lungs and feeling a bit of a headache, but if I can post at a time like this, then I can do it much more often than I am now. Let’s set that precedent.
Time: 38:34
Never try to learn something on your own from the get-go. That’s like learning how to box by watching highlight reels of boxing. It is much more efficient taught from master to student.
You learn so much faster if someone can point out the next thing you are misunderstanding.
The picozines are my game dev teacher right now. Working through the Toy Train example, which is graphically intense. Will continue parsing tomorrow.
Day 194
Time: 26:28
Made a little sample song today.
There’s quite a bit of music capability in here. You can assemble notes in the SFX editor with control for volume and tone, and then when you are done with your pattern, you can organize them into patterns and make music.
Plans:
-Make my sample games quickly playable through a link
-Continue through tutorials
Day 193
A little turkey day tinkering.
Time: 46:11
Going through Pico-8 Fanzine #1! It starts you off with a simple paddle game.
My favorite part about Pico-8 thus far is the enclosed sandbox feel of it. I am limited to the confines of the console, and this allows me to focus on creativity and game mechanics over implementation details.
Great starting place for aspiring game developers. Continuing through fanzines tomorrow.
Day 192
Coding on rails today. Some Pico-8 tutorials.
Time: 26:03
Pico-8 is pretty neat! Some cool things:
- You can save your game as a virtual cartridge that you load into the console OR you can save the game as a PNG image! (which holds all game data!) or traditional HTML/JS.
- It’s so bare-bones with just the essentials that I feel like I won’t ever get overwhelmed. It’s like a game dev sandbox.
More tutorials next and hopefully get to making some music 🙂
Day 191
Time to get situated with Pico-8.
Time: 26:59
Powered through this this tutorial and started Fan-zine 1, written by the creators of Pico-8 and others.
I’m all informed about the capabilities here. It’s got a nice little command line and editors for code, sprites, music and sound effects. Extremely simple.
I’ll be building the example game from the Fan-zine for the next few days. Especially looking forward to making some music.
Day 190
Back!
There are no long-term plans right now, I just want to continue learning game dev in public for fun.
Today, I plan on reading up on the Pico-8. Pico-8 is an extremely simple game dev suite + console. The most interesting point for me about it is the capabilities are simple and limited, so you’re a lot more likely to keep your games in scope and finish them.
All games created for it are also open source and free to download, so that makes a huge range of games to try and study.
And it comes with a music/SFX editor, which is something I’ve wanted to play with for a while 🙂 I will be tinkering with sound first thing in my next game.
Time: 20:03
Bought and read up on the console.
As I read up on it, I came across the C.H.I.P., which is a $9 computer that comes with Pico-8 installed and hooks up to any monitor. That sounds like a great thing to develop on for three reasons:
- I can’t get distracted while developing on the underpowered, isolated computer.
- I can take my little computer chip anywhere that has a monitor and immediately start developing.
- I can start thinking about the applications of a Raspberry Pi-type computer. I’ve always wanted to explore those.
Sounds intriguing. I’ll continue tinkering with Pico-8 tomorrow.
Hiatus
I’ve been away from this blog for a while for a number of reasons. The most draining reason was lack of motivation.
In retrospect, I can divide my hangups into two statements.
I was thinking too short-term when it came to my goals and dreams. If you don’t dream far ahead enough into the future when you work on a project, if you only look at what changes today and what comes tomorrow, all you see is work. Piles and piles of work. You lose sight of the payoff.
You have to look into the future at some tantalizing goal and imagine how cool it would be if the world had that in it. I recently looked ahead, and this blog looks cool again. This blog will be a completed video game in the making, chronicled day-by-day. Awesome.
I was overthinking life. I let myself generally start thinking about life in terms of tradeoffs with thoughts about how my responsibilities should keep rising and I have to think hard about what I need to prune out and start focusing on the “important” things. I should be choosing the “practical” option and not the ones I love.
I was able to find motivation again after I took a step back and thought about the absurdity of that thinking.
This is my life, and life is one big MMO. I am free to pursue whatever I want. I don’t have to pursue what everyone else is pursuing. As long as I can pay my bills and I am pursuing something I love, I am fine.
With the right perspective and freedom from outside pressures, I have motivation and love for what I am pursuing once again. It feels amazing. That being said, I have decided I am going to put this project on hold for a while as I pursue another idea with a friend.
If I start feeling like I can focus on work, project, and this blog, then I will, but I’d like to completely immerse myself into the others. So for now, this will have to wait. Until then. 🙂
Day 189
Plan today:
-allow selection of dialogue choice and show answer.
Time: 25:13
Done! Commit
Dialogue System Design:
I want to understand this system, so I’m going to refactor my dialogue system in a way that makes sense to me.
Exposing the number of lines in a dialogue statement makes this extra complicated. We should wrap the idea of “dialogue” into an object and then map them to each other.
More on this next time.
