New longest streak in the Decade Jam, rawr!

That said, I'll probably stop now. Nobody else is using this so I'd rather use a more reliable journaling method. Still feels good though :p

Today I ventured away from Blender and back into the more familiar-to-me world of CAD. I'm having trouble visualising how things interact in Blender, and the scale of everything is just made up, whereas CAD is all about precise measurements and assemblies of many individual parts. Probably not a common way to go about making game terrain but whatever, if it works it works.

The rest of the week I'll be continuing in my GLS refactoring work to allow more control over dialogue options and how different characters react to your choices. But I might not write about it here.

...until I steal the longest streak in the Decade Jam.

Today is Sunday so as per it was a quiet one. Planned my dev tasks for the week as I work slowly but surely towards a working prototype of GLS, bit of Blender, but mostly just good food and fantasy football. All things in moderation.

I refactored on a Saturday, that makes me feel a bit dirty. But it has to be done, and now I've worked out a better dialogue system, so it's all good. Also did some Blender practise, and watched Con Air, so all in all an acceptable day.

Today as part of the Blender-off, I decided to make a load of low poly versions of things from Kerbal Space Program. Just for practise, you know. It's not technically relevant to my game but is relevant to learning to make art for games in general, so that's fine for a streak entry.

Also had a pizza. Good times.

Continuing with the bit-by-bit refactor of my code for GLS, in order to add new features.

The core mechanic relies on the passage of days, so I'm adding in a button to skip to the next day and having it only become interactable once the current day's goings on are all dealt with.

Sounds simple right? Yeah, well, I'm sure it would've been if I had any idea what I was doing at the start of this project, but that's half the fun.

See title.

I'm getting on with Blender to the point where I think it might be easier to make some of the 2d graphics for GLS by making them 3d and just having the camera be orthographic. Need to think about whether that's worth it or not.

In the meantime a friend just started learning Blender too so now we're in a sort of Blender-off. Might be leftover competitive energy from the fantasy football season starting up this week.

Yep it's time for some boring bits. I need to redo how some of my game systems work to support new features, so while I wrote a decent amount of code today nothing actually looks different.

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow I might get so far as adding a new UI button! Gasp.

Puzzle design!

That is all for today.

And I won the draft, so hooray.

But that doesn't count for a streak, so today I also started working out the rules for handling different categories of random events in my game. Some will just basically be an alert, some will require a decision, and some will kick off a whole conversation with a character.

This is the last big mechanism that needs to be in place before I can call the project prototyped, woop!

Busy weekend! Between the fantasy football season kicking off, supporting various friends streams, and relearning how to play Necromunda, there's not much time for work this weekend at all.

In the spirit of no zero days though, I did spend a small amount of time this morning helping a friend with his game prototype, which lead to me learning more about first person movement and camera. That's enough for today to count!

Who would've thought that making video games involves so much bloody writing?!

My big project is going to need a ton of content, so I've started drafting some of that out. It'll also need a ton of art, eventually, but I'll probably bring someone in to do that.

Actually coding the thing up is fine and fun, but writing is like pulling teeth. Still, it'll be worth it!

Continuing with my chill week, did some mapping and writing work today with the goal of updating one of my jam games and making it less ass.

That's it for this entry though because I've already gone to bed :p

Still feeling a bit off, so gave myself permission to be lazy and spend most of the day playing games. Considering I'm a student and it's the summer holidays, it's somehow literally months since I had a day like that.

It wasn't completely wasted, however. Now that I'm getting away from jams and back to my real project I have some serious refactoring to do to take into account everything I learned in the meantime. It's surprisingly fun, which is good because this definitely won't be the last time I realise my code is terrible, but also doesn't take a huge amount of brainpower so that's perfect for right now.

Hoping to get back up to full speed soon but if there's one thing I know about migraines, it's that "powering through" always ends badly.

Today I had the option to join yet another jam. But instead I declined, and will spend the next week and a bit fixing up my past entries instead! How mature.

Worked a bit on my newfound 3d modelling skills today to create some new scenery for my Rainbow Jam game. It's been a crap few days and I'm still not feeling great, so just going to take it easy and do little bits here and there this week.

Besides, both of my fantasy leagues draft this week so there's limited time for devving!

Migraine. No typey. Placeholder post to keep streak and I'll edit it tomorrow!

Migraine. No typey. Placeholder post to keep streak and I'll edit it tomorrow!

Got migraine. Missed jam deadline for the first time (although they're allowing late submission so I'll still count it as a success).

All I managed today was some planning because ow. But still, technically not a zero day.

Apparently the organisers got the jam end date wrong, so hooray another day!

Rough day today so I didn't get much done, the deadline extension was definitely a godsend. Did manage some dialogue and a few other bits, but broadly I would sum up today as "blergh".

Hopefully soon I get to the point where I know enough to be able to accurately scope a game jam project. But it is not this day.

Essentially now I'm just seeing what there's time for. The bf took some time off work so I'm just jamming in between our other activities and if it doesn't get finished then sod it, there's more important things.

Today I managed an intro cutscene, improvements to the (rough as hell) day / night cycle, work on the camera, and other bits and bobs. Still need to finish off the game ending sequence, and I want to customise the environment a bit depending on choices the player made early in their journey.

Should be able to get something halfway decent submitted. That's as optimistic as I dare be at this point...

Chugging along today as per, nothing dramatic to report but just ticking things off the list. Tomorrow I need to work on my start and end cutscenes, and write some more dialogue.

Technically there are other features I'd wanted to put in, but meh. Currently too warm to be bothered about those, we'll see if that changes tomorrow!

This was a low effort post after a high effort day. I deserve a break :p

The deadline is on Saturday night. My main personal deadline to get most of it done is tomorrow night.

There are 38 things on the list. FML.

Today I did manage to figure out some camera stuff, model a couple extra bits, and generally started ticking things off the aforementioned list. Even made a custom shader! But there's a long way to go tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Ugh, today was annoying. I got hardly anything done due to shaders being incomprehensible and every single tutorial I tried to follow being out of date or just plain broken.

I even talked to a member of Unity's shader graph programming team and she agreed it's all gibberish unless you know a ton of maths and that they don't really have good resources on it. So, I guess shaders aren't for me!

Need to find an alternative way of making things look decent tomorrow, since I can't find any suitable shaders to download either. Bleh.

Most of a day lost there, I am not impressed.

Also a giant cog, and a bridge and a signpost, and a lot of rocks. Really getting on with Blender now I've found a suitable style. It's kind of ass in terms of interface, but once you have some hotkeys memorised it gets a lot better.

So that was today, just making a ton of assets. Tomorrow will probably be about halfy half assets and actual coding, I need to start on the low hanging fruit like putting in start / end screens and whatnot.

Already starting to plot what sort of thing I might make for the next jam. I think I have a problem.

Almost forgot to update tonight, but that's what the phone alarms are for! Yes, alarms plural, because I'm easily distracted.

Not much progress to report today because Sunday. I made a plan for the week ahead, and did a very small amount of modelling in Blender. Need to wrap my head around how to make things at the correct scale, but for now I'm proud of my clumsy attempts.

Lots of progress planned for tomorrow so let's hope it actually works out that way!

Stayed up late last night trying to solve issues with my camera movement, failed, got about two hours sleep then woke up and immediately fixed it. Who knows!

Of course, it's the weekend so I didn't get a whole lot of time to work on anything other than that. I've made a start on a generic cloaked pixel art fella but don't know if it'll end up being usable or not. Just another thing I need to learn how to do, funtimes!

The plan is to take it easy and get an early night tonight, then worry about everything tomorrow instead. The jam deadline seemed ages away when it was midnight on Saturday, but now my effective deadline is midnight Thursday it seems alarmingly close D: