so now on this completely separate trip, i managed to snag my own copy of the Heckadeck card game, and am right back at discussing card game designs with friends. cool stuff

kind of a long winded story to this, but in short, i'm trying to physically print a bunch of placeholder images for a card game using as little ink as possible. so with a friend's help, we wrote a userscript that runs on the browser that makes everything way more printer friendly. very satisfying use of javascript. and now i can put together a card game for a much lower price!

our team got #8 out of 330 games! not bad, considering the enormous skewing of low ratings, it felt like a far greater gamble. i went and compiled some of the numbers from past jams and discovered just how much of an outlier this jam is with its huge $100k prize incentive. there was also conversation in the discord along those lines, and although i don't want to seem particularly jealous or ungrateful, i do want to talk critically about how itch.io could improve features they have available to jam organizers!

things like allowing organizers to mark winners completely separate from voting results, and other tools to adjust scoring when results can become significantly skewed for high profile submissions.

although there are still plenty more boxes and shelves left to get, i went out and bought just a couple things so that i could start the first part of physically organizing various game pieces i have around the house. i also want to carry a decent number of things on this upcoming trip, so portability was an important thing to consider. i think everything is ready for that trip, and i feel like i've settled on most of my strategy, so today was a good milestone!

went through and corrected a few sections that had poor wording. also fixed some errors. i remembered that i do want to produce more poorly drawn example artwork for most sections...

opened up my unity omega project today, punched in a little work on attacking. set up my goofy DelayedBool again and got some new ideas for the class. next is just to hit some hitbox to show up.

kind of a lazy saturday. i did sent one bulky email that will hopefully get seen over the next few days. it'd be nice a get a response before i leave on a trip next weekend.

i also helped a friend with a design thing, which is a bit in anticipation of that same trip.

also, voting ended for the Level 99 jam today! i went through the pages for a lot of the submissions again. results will be later this week!

had a meet up today where i showed my progress over the last month and got to talk to others about their own projects. we went over design improvements, helped make decisions, and we all had the excuse to open a game engine to take a small look at how it was made.

i definitely appreciate that these meetings are a month apart because it feels like the right amount of time to get real work done, but at the same time, a small part of me wishes it could happen more often.

today should've been a bigger dev day, but i got so caught up in stuff that i missed the window for it entirely. been planning stuff for this second upcoming trip late next week! but i did poke into that deck idea a little further...

while i've been on a spree of card design and organization, i've spent a lot of today doing research and designing a better system for all of my cards here.

a total of 206 cards. all mistakes amended, but i kind of feel like i might still be able to do a little more with it. for now, it's fine

only now do i realize that i don't have four copies of each mahjong tile. i think this immediately ruins the chances of me keeping the deck at 160 tiles, because there isn't a sensible way to condense 4 copies of 9 numbers of 3 suits into 1 copy of 15 numbers of 8 suits, even if it's numerically possible...

tiresome day, but i was surprisingly mentally prepared for all of it. guess it's easy when your flight isn't all that long.

back at home, i remembered all of my playing card nonsense just before bed and worked on that for a bit.

a lot more work to do today tidying up and getting ready for the end of the trip! but i did draw a little more stuff for the new deck idea

so with all of this rampant card game design nonsense with heckadeck, today i suddenly realized that i could make my own custom deck that is a superset of the games i like, such as poker, president, golf, and... riichi mahjong maybe? so i have a 160 card deck, same size as heckadeck, but with cards that are an unusual overlapping of different cultures of card games. maybe we'll see some work on that later this month?

we ended up designing what i feel is an excellent set of rules for several heckadeck cards in the card game golf... there are still several more to go, but i'm very satisfied

got my laptop open and did some work on some game design diagram stuff. kind of hard to focus with everything else going on, but i'm surprised i found the energy to log into accounts and do something small.

although today was busy in its own ways, today we did design some card game stuff, except it was very different from expected. one friend has actually been meaning to design a card game based on his own digital game, and we spent some time before bed considering some very different game mechanics and balances for it.

so of course i'm hanging out with some gamedev friends, and we're given a very odd superset of the standard 52 card deck. so we're gradually working on designing variations of other card games that would make sense with a deck with up to 160 cards in it (including all of the original 52). today was President, tomorrow is probably Golf.

while i had a little free time inside today, i did some management of my itch games. my laptop has actually decided to have a few issues conveniently on this trip, which i'm still troubleshooting, but it was easy to open some webpages and fix some stuff.

really barely counts as a dev day today, but i did get my development documents open today, and that nearly counts for something considering how busy it was otherwise.

bracing myself for a busy day tomorrow. i'm really only managing to touch on projects in the meantime, so the upcoming week will be a little absent minded.

somehow managed to get just a touch of work done today. then spent a little time on design work tonight. it's thursday, and normally i'd have wanted to actually code something, but there's just too much on the mind.

i managed to get unity open today. the 2nd satellite prototype already separates out player physics, which i still think is a good idea, but it still needs to account for friction per surface. i also want to work in the leg box idea and implement surface snapping, but there's a lot of thought that has to go into that.

still just a little side project work as i can manage it. between closing up unfinished job work, writing lists of things to pack and organizing a schedule for an upcoming trip out of the state, and making sure all of daily life tasks are still in a manageable state, i kind of feel like a tangled mess. hoping that by the end of the month i'm feeling less stressed.