I still think I’m fiddling too much while making puzzles. I’ll have an idea for a puzzle (usually based on an an interesting edge case) but then to implement that idea it takes too much space or is really messy and inelegant. The number blocks definitely helped give me more expressiveness in a smaller space, but I think I need a few more elements.
A few I’m considering:
Door door - a door that opens when all other doors have opened on a screen
Jammer (?) - disables objects in an area around it. Pushable. This one is fun because it has a lot of potential uses and interactions in how it “disables” other objects.
The inverse idea does have some interesting interactions. Wonder if I should make it a one-off or try to flesh out the idea. Feels a little limited if it only interacts strictly in the presence of another element, but it does make it so that jammers would be even more versatile.
Welp, I’m gonna throw in the towel on my over ambitious secret 3d idea as I would like to work on it in the longer term and don’t want to stress on it right now. I can offer some help with music or sound if anybody is interested.
Still might try to make something about throwing stuff as I learned a lot about Godot’s physics this month.
I probly won’t have anything finished but I did generate a bunch more “paintings” last night to the point where I think I have enough. I can now convert them to block textures, then import them and all that’s left is, uh
music
writing
design
a graphic for which i would need to learn how to use blender at some basic level
Here’s what i’m working on, it was going to be called Star Witch but a game of that name already exists. At least I didn’t spend ages making a logo. I’m not particularly happy with any of it, apart from the stars and the pixel shatter which are passable.
Today I have been putting in game logic so that you can start and play and get a score and stop playing if you crash. And working on the logic for making different waves. I’m not really sure how to handle that, at the moment each wave will have it’s own function for initializing and updating and drawing. Maybe i will need to share functions between enemy types as i start to run out of space.
Anyway I’m pleased to have got a fair bit done today, next i should be able to start making different monster movement patterns!
I have started to procrastinate on my project in the best way possible because the pressure of making this while everyone else is also making something pushed me to work on my “day job” porn game. It’s a bit of a shame because I worked super hard on the bakedown game for about 2 weeks and I’m at the same time proud of it and embarrassed for it. I’ll dig it out again for next year’s bakedown and maybe finish it then?? For now I’m super happy to have gained the strength to work on my porn game again, which is only because I took a break from it and because of this thread.
I finally figured out how to not have repeat sections of the same conditionals in Ren’Py, by the way. It’s probably my greatest programming achievement. I always knew I was doing something wrong but couldn’t figure out how to do better and now I did. This combined with having figured out how to not make super deep and complicated conditionals really takes a load off my shoulders. I had to do a lot of needlessly menial work before and now I feel like I’m finally getting it
I actually think switching back and forth between projects is a legit motivation strategy. My sister says she does this at work – she’s switching between pieces of like 7 different tasks at any given time, but she has a hard time staying motivated if she tries force herself to do one task start to finish.
After successfully porting Scran over to Chez Scheme I decided I wanted to write a simpler Entity-Component-System Framework which was more “schemy” so I created “mecs.” Originally, mecs only tracked entities and their components. Systems were represented as independent objects, fundamentally functioning as queries that could be executed against the mecs system.
Then I realized that you really do want some default behavior for some systems so I went ahead and added tracked systems to mecs itself. That means that for some user defined systems entities are added and removed from separate entity lists when their components change appropriately.
This puts mecs at feature-parity with Scran, pretty much. The one major difference is that Scran tried really hard, by carefully considering side effects, make iteration over system entities make sense, even if you deleted or added entities to systems as you were iterating over them.
I kinda decided this is a bad design anyway. I think the preferred way to deal with this is to stage entity modification more carefully so that it doesn’t happen during system iteration. Entities will have message inboxes or something and process messages at controlled intervals. Not sure.
