Working with a custom engine under construction with a friend, building example games.

Seems I accidentally submitted to the daily DJ streak and the monthly one. Can't submit a new post, so...editing time!

Original Post:

Rust learning picks up again after an unsuccessful Ludum Dare weekend (thanks, health). Going to aim for steady progress going forward on both learning and developing new things.

April Review:

A lot has happened this April, though I have little concrete to show for it.

A vastly improved knowledge of Rust and engine building has made me interested in using Rust for many projects. Most of my streak posts have been about Rust, and I've enjoyed it greatly.

Ludum Dare went poorly, in part because I attempted essentially constructing a Rust engine on top of two frameworks that I barely understood. I'll be taking some time away from jams for now (Decade Jam aside), and I expect I'll be heading into the next several only with tools I'm fairly solid on.

The real victory this month has been using Anki to learn Rust and Toki Pona (a tiny conlang). Rust in particular has been a nice surprise - my health is now less of an obstacle with the knowledge so well embedded in my head through spaced repetition and so frequently reviewed. I need to apply the same treatment to C# and GDScript, as well as algorithms, design patterns, and more. Game design itself I can do to a decent degree of success all the time, thanks to years of constant thinking about it, so it's a matter of being able to implement what's in my mind.

Productivity is my goal for May, with an emphasis on product. The Decade Jam Community Project Task Force is ~~steadily lengthening its acronym of DJCPTF~~ hammering out the final details of our game and I am even now working on early code for it. Test projects for a custom engine are underway as well, and I expect to have multiple test games to show off in next month's summary post.

While I expect to continue to focus on Rust and Godot, I am not opposed to a return to Unity or Phaser as well. I hope to construct a strong portfolio over the next two months, and while I think my skill in game design, mechanics, and AI are solid (always worth improving, though), I think my generalist knowledge is another strength. I'm trying to be a T-shaped person, as some say. Being able to work across several engines and frameworks will not only improve my skills, but make me more likely to be available to help with a particular task or job, plus help others cross such divides.

Here's hoping for plenty of productivity next month.

Little development time today, but pretty much all spent combining different Tetra examples into a more functional whole, with the end goal (not yet completed) of a main menu and other base code for Ludum Dare.

With Ludum Dare coming this weekend and Rust + Tetra my tools of choice, I'm hurrying to understand both. Went through every single Tetra example today - rather pleased that it works with the controllers I have. Also pleased I did this at all - I was rather drained today, so not breaking the streak is something I'm rather proud about. Quite a bit ahead of me to feel confident for this weekend, but every inch counts.

Multiple chapters of the Rust Book touched on today, plus a recreation of Pong in Tetra, a Rust framework for 2D games based on XNA/Monogame. Cheers for Kenney's assets - he's certainly a solid provider of art as usual. https://kenney.nl/

More Rust, albeit slower today. Progress is progress.

After several days off due to health concerns and basically just maintaining new knowledge, I'm back to improving my Rust skills, with an aim at developing games - including the upcoming Ludum Dare 46. Anki is proving to be a useful tool for maintaining knowledge - despite several days off or barely interacting with Rust, I don't feel like I've moved backwards at all.

Taking a break from the Rust Book, today I started work on a roguelike, learning about the tcod library and the lovely things it can be used for. Slow progress, but ongoing.

After some time spent learning more about the basics of Rust, I ended up taking the tutorial from yesterday and expanding it into a more complex game. Not quite as fancy as I'd like, but then, I wouldn't particularly like to spend too much more time working on console guessing games. That said...this was way more enjoyable than when I remember doing this sort of thing learning other languages. Is it because I aged, because of my recent motivation, or because of Rust? I have no clue, but here's the results.

The game has you guessing three numbers before you hit either of the two bad ones, akin to a very simple text Minesweeper game. It's even easier than I expected it would be once you get a hang of the patterns, but I'm still pleased with it in general. I may or may not make one more variant before moving onto something more complex. I may start branching out into graphical programs, or I may wait until I'm further along in the Rust Book.

In either case, I think I can definitely say that so far it appears that taking notes via input into Anki is a success. I feel like I definitely was forced to learn more thoroughly and will be able to retain information more easily. Time will tell exactly how successful I am, though.

It's a small thing, but today I started to learn Rust, and I appreciated the official book about learning Rust starting with a Hello World and then a game of some sort. Learning through games has always been a bit (or a lot) easier for me, and I enjoyed laying things out for this, even though it was far simpler than anything I've made in a while - makes me want to make more games in Rust, and in general!