Friedrich Hanisch's Dev Log
SEEN
- Some gameplay of Behind Stars and Under Hills can be seen in the series "Deutscher" on the German broadcast ZDF (3rd episode, 25:02)! I totally forgot about this - back in 2019 a TV production company asked us if they could use a video of one of our games.
https://mstdn.io/@ratking/113839883289963346
SEEN
- I just learned that Mark Sibly, creator of several easy to use game development languages/tools, has passed away last month. I really enjoyed Blitz3D back in the day and even bought Monkey and tried to make some small games with it. It was always cool to be able to use BASIC in combination with versatile graphics engines. In any case it's nice to read so many testimonials of Sibly's influence on game developers' careers.
https://notices.nzherald.co.nz/nz/obituaries/nzherald-nz/name/mark-sibly-obituary?id=57014447
DONE
- My brother released the intro video that I made for his art exhibition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fygmO6KNcDk
- It was a bit more complicated than I anticipated, but now a dialog can branch differently in Mops & Mobs depending on the outcome of a fight. The problem was, of course, that there was no result until the player did the fight, but the dialog nodes would advance until the next "stopping node" (Text or Choice). So any Condition node would be evaluated too early. I added a "pause" functionality that is called as soon as a Script node notices that the current game state isn't the dialog mode anymore. This works well enough, but in the future I might create a dedicated Combat node for dialogs in order to combine the Script and the Condition.
DONE
- While the player is walking through the dungeons of Mops & Mobs they're triggering different actions with each step, like a dialog starts or music changes. This happens via
Dummy nodes. If the game were more physics-based I'd use Area3Ds, but I found it more logical to just use points at distinct positions; might be a decision born out of overthinking, but it's what we use now. Over the months the Dummy script received more and more functionality - not only do the dummies start dialogs or change music, they can also change the whole ambience, teleport the player to another dummy or level, and so on. But while the code doesn't have to be beautiful, I still thought having so many optional parameters makes the dummies unneccessary bulky, and creating different types of Dummy scripts that handle each case individually isn't as easy as in Unity with its MonoBehaviour component system. After some thinking I decided to use Godot's resource system. Each dummy now has an array of "traits", and every trait is inheriting a DummyTrait which is a Resource script. This means seldom used dummy functionalities like is_player_start don't pollute all dummies, which I like. I also added the posibility to create custom scripts, like they're used in dialogs already. I don't really use a scripting language currently for the game, but if the need arises it should be easy to parse some simple if-then-else constructs.
SEEN
DONE
- Currently I'm not really working on anything worth mentioning (unfortunately), but I'm preparing a video for my brother's art exhibition. The exhibition is called BACKROOM, so of course it's just a fly-through in a labyrinthine backroom, with the typical wallpaper and carpet floor. I use bloed to create the level along a simple path. Dreamteck's spline tool is a bit overpowered for the camera path, but at least I don't have to make my own bezier curves. Annoyingly there was a bug that would only appear in the standalone build and not in the editor (the position change of the spline during
Start() wouldn't be recognized by the path follower anymore).
