Devlog #04 - Where have you been?

The story so far

Man, I had a couple of busy months! August was all about exams at university, but fortunately everything went really well. I'm far from any "danger zone" and that's a great feeling. In September I finally had my well deserved rest, enjoying my life, only casually working on the engine. A cute little kitty joined us and now inhabits our dev-cave. Good times!

LudumDare

October's right where the madness began. Me and my partner attended LudumDare and honestly, it was a bit of a bust. We did our best, we had a lot of fun, we learned a lot and were quite proud of ourselves. Then came the judging phase. Oh boy, that was really depressing to see our game end up deep down. It wasn't that our game was particularly broken or unfinished, we just didn't match the taste of most attendees. Lesson learned; being different is a giant risk, rating-wise, so either adapt yourself to it or stop caring. Here's The Game.

At the same time the new semester started, putting some short but important courses right at the beginning in all its group-work glory. But overall it was nice even though it conflicted with the jam and stressed me out at times.

GithubGameOff

In November we just started the next jam, "Github Game Off" which was running the whole month. I tried to use this opportunity to rework big parts of the engine, make it more "Unity" like, but in a good way. I underestimated the task and this time we didn't even got to finish. The assets are great and we laid down lots of very important groundwork so we'll probably return to this project at some time and finish it properly. We uploaded it nevertheless and I just looked at the result. 211 of 234. That's really not bad for a barely functional tech demo of an unfinished game!

Just for funsies we also uploaded a small prototype game we threw together one afternoon for a university course. Coincidentally it matched the theme quite well and wow. We even reached place 166 of 234. It's about a frog jumping from left to the right, play it if you want, but beware, it's a bit difficult.

SemesterGameJam

And last but not least we attended ANOTHER game jam in December. And this time for real, no online event. We even got free pizza and all. This time I didn't code anything. I would have, but people were afraid of my C++ stuff and we already had three Unity-devs, so me and my partner dealt with our main character in Blender. We weren't quite as eager as last time (which ended in a desaster anyway), tried to enjoy all talks and event aspects and focused on having fun while getting our stuff done in time. It worked, we got a lot of praise and that especially for our character which astonished us greatly. A mix of 2D and 3D artwork apparently doesn't have to end up in the uncanny valley, contrary to the opinion of one of our team members. We won third place out of somewhat fifteen groups or so. That was great! Try it yourself if you want!

So yeah. Then was Christmas time, I got a new computer funded by my partner which was really really nice. And now it's time to get back on track. Do some stuff for the upcoming exams in February. Finish the last group work until the end of January. Make some other games. Survive. That's it!

What about the Salmon?

Lots. And I mean like, really a lot. I somewhat wrote as much code as I wrote the whole last year(s). I try to keep it short with a changelog-esque bullet list.

• Text generation and rendering
• Actor rotation
• Actor spawning
• Support for mouse motion, click, drag, etc.
• Support for touch as mouse input
• Better setting of animation states
• Add a colorful logger with timestamp and priority
• JPG and TIF support
• Way easier more robust and simply better key input handling
• Easy injection of variables into actors from tiled editor
• "Library version" of the engine (super useful, will be used instead of event system)
• MP3 and FLAC support
• Optional preloading of textures, sound and music.
• Actor resize including its hitboxes
• Gamepad support which works the same as if a key is pressed
• Clean up LOTS of ugly code
• Fix LOTS of ugly bugs
• Lots and lots of other small features and fixes I simply forgot

The most recent version of the engine is found on the now somewhat misleading "dev-gameoff19" branch. It's now used inside a kind of "high level" game engine/manager to make things easier, although you could use it "raw", but I chose to make a "Unity-like" way to manipulate actors via code. You can see it in action here but I will soon strip all reusable code into a separate repository which I'll use as a template for future projects.

I hope you enjoyed this post, see ya!