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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

So after successfully stealing the 100th post for the Decade Jam streak, where can today's post even go?

I continued my experiments with 2D lighting in Unity today, and understand a bit more of what I'm doing with it now. Then onto my main project, which has a big unanswered question right now about a certain aspect of the gameplay and I'm pretty much avoiding answering it, so instead I spent some time on speech styles.

The game involves managing a team of people, and I want them to seem "real". So I'm assigning each of the randomly generated characters a speech style and then characters saying essentially the same thing as each other will do so in a completely different way.

Not completely sure if it'll be worth the effort, but it's a fun time anyway!

That's about it for today. This is your 100th streaker, signing off.

Having only learned even the most basic of concepts in Unity about a month prior, this month I managed to convince my bf to team up with me and make a game for My First Game Jam: Summer 2020. Over the two weeks we made a very clunky and frustrating 2D platformer. Based on a weird in-joke and complete with a totally unnecessary backstory for our protagonist, Good Luck With The Lamps! did surprisingly well in the jam and ended up near the top of the "popular" list, which was very exciting!

We'll hopefully keep going with development and try to make it actually good, but we gave ourselves some time off to recover after the end of the jam.

Riding the high of a successful jam submission, I immediately joined two more. One involves making a story-driven game, 100% out of my comfort zone, for which I'm attempting a visual novel. The other lasts for a decade, so no rush there!

As well as all this I've made some good progress this month on the underlying systems for my long-term project, a management game about running an MMO guild. No screenshots to share for that one yet, but I'm happy with progress so far.

Productive month!

Worked on the art for my second gamejam game. It's all very rough and simplistic because art is in no way my comfort zone, but it'll get there.

Also managed to bash out a couple of small bugfixes on my long-term project, before it got too hot to do anything at all.