Friedrich Hanisch's Dev Log
SEEN
- Zen-C seems like an interesting project to me - basically a modern version of C. But it's so young that I don't think I will have a serious look this year. It just feels like V, and that one is highly prone to bugs even after years. Instead I still have the plan to learn either Zig or Odin or even both, just to have more options.
- I always like learning of neat (free) software, this time a 2D animation program called Friction.
- Folded Paper Engine is a Godot plugin that improves the Blender to Godot pipeline, so that the level designer is able to do much more within Blender. Might be useful for future Rat King projects.
- Another cool project, made possible by Godot's recent library-fication: 2dog. You basically use all the rendering capabilities and so on from Godot via C#, directly. I guess it's comparable to MonoGame?
- And something to try when there is time (haha): KAPLAY.js is a HTML5 game engine that looks kinda fun to use.
- I read an article about the making of Dungeon Master, with interviews from the original developers. "Mike created the dungeon, but the individual puzzles were created by all of us. I probably created the most puzzles, but I think Dennis and Wayne created some of the best. We would tinker around and create [them], and then try them out on each other. Eventually, we had to include other people, because you needed to have fresh people as you refined the puzzles. The play testing was quite extensive." rings definitely true, I think a lot of our puzzles would benefit from more eyes on them too.
- Interesting tip by digitalbreed for new Unity 6 projects: disable the search index in order to increase performance.
DONE
- The weekend in Schmitten (Hessen) was nice - I took part in a board game jam, which was (almost) a first for me. And that's why I joined Thomas Thudt and Martin Esters to work on Demokarten - Demokratie durchgespielt!, a resource-management deck-builder card game, about democratic parties trying to get the most voters. (The theme of the jam was Democracy.) Most of the time I tried to understand the rules and write them into a document, so others would be able to play it too. The prototyping phase was far too short for my taste - we began work on Saturday morning and early afternoon we already had to have a playable version ready. It was fun though, and the "final" product didn't even matter much to me - it was nice meeting so many people from the real of board games, and of course it helps that the whole trip was paid for by the tax payers.
Still, I'm currently trying to design and layout a document with the cards for printing, so we can upload everything on itch. It will be pretty minimalistic, but for me it's a good opportunity to get into Affinity Designer, especially as it has some strange quirks. (No button to vertically center texts?!) After a while I switched to the new version, where all three Affinity products were melted into a single one. A bit strange, but this way I could create several pages of cards without much hassle. I hate that I have to log into my Canva account all the time though.
- I uploaded a very minimalistic bloed-like on Codeberg. Golem is a level editor add-on for Godot, and so far it works okay-ish, but I don't think anybody else would get much out of it, because of course there are far better tools out there. Sometimes I just get the NIH syndrome. I already 'use' it for a little side side project that is just a recreation of one of my 1-hour-game-jam games, but that one takes a bit longer, because there is so much else to work on.
- While trying to add some grid functionalities for Golem just like I have them in bloed, I noticed that Godot does not expose its editor 3D camera's pivot point (called camera cursor here). So I began a Github discussion about adding this feature. I'd really like to use this point to be able to define the position of my grid (where the user then can place bloxels). And it would also be cool to move this point (and the camera) to a specific position on the bloxel objects.
- There isn't much to say about Mops & Mobs currently, because I mostly tried to think of a main quest story line for the third level, and such things always take longer than I'd like. But I also worked on something that always was a tiny but annoying issue - empty dialog choices. Most of the important characters have an option called "Tell me about...", and when the player selects it there would be several topics to choose from. These topics get (de)activated dynamically, depending on the current chapter, active quests, etc - and when you talked about everything, the "Tell me about..." branch would be empty, which means it should be hidden. But the dialogs are very dynamic graphs, so it's not straight-forward to check if a choice node has further choices as children, and if those are active or not. As this can lead to some strange bugs if the writer isn't careful, I decided to only do such a check for choice nodes with a special internal tag.
- Mops & Mobs suffers from a strange visual bug, where point lights would produce very pixel-y shadows if they are behind the camera. Apparently this is known for years in Godot, and a fix seems to be low priority, unfortunately.
PLAN
- I write this log entry while on my way to the bpb board game jam. Usually the bpb jams attracts people from various fields and backgrounds, but this time the jam's Discord is full of experts in the board game field. Which means this weekend I'm pretty much the noob and 'outsider'.
SEEN
- I watched a dev log of Evan Todd's current game project, about how blue noise made his game feel more "alive". The most interesting part to me is that Todd is making a new game. I was quite amazed by Lemma back then (though it was too hard for me to finish it), and backed the Kickstarter of his second game, which unfortunately didn't work out. Apparently he now uses Godot instead of his own engine.
- A short article about the Github monopoly and about contributing to open source projects, from the perspective of a teacher.
- Maybe I'm easy to amuse, but I chuckled when I watched this video about Street Fighter II, and how they fixed a typo shortly before release - back when fixing typos inside graphics assets was not easy at all.
DONE
- We released version 0.4.4 of the Mops & Mobs demo. We wanted to have it ready for the Steam Detective Fest, so it includes the new decoration mode functionalities and the new detective-like quest where the player has to take notes (gasp). Unfortunately we were not allowed to include the game in the Steam Fest, but we uploaded the demo nonetheless. Finally there's also a dedicated Steam page for it, so if you are inclined to write a few words about it, you can now leave a review.
- I started a simple experiment to recreate bloed in Godot. Well, it won't have the same amount of features in the near or far future, but I'd like to have something where I can very quickly build (and edit) small minimalistic bloxel levels in my preferred workflow. Right now I don't even plan to support different bloxel types, and different textures would be a big nice-to-have. Optimization is also not a concern for now. Instead I just try to get comfortable with extending the Godot editor via GDScript, and maybe make a low effort game with it just for testing the editor. Some day I also might look into GDExtensions.
