WEEKLY UPDATE! GAME 05 (& GAME 06???) (Patreon)

Here we go! This week: finishing up the first lil explorations on game 06 (more on that later) and (slowly) getting back into game 05.

The "new project manic energy high" has started to wane a bit, so I can free up some headspace for actual gamedev work again and I've started moving back into game 05, trying to dig around and working out what I want to re-work and what will be "good enough" for release.

So let's start with that. I dug around the code, started moving some stuff around. Still lots more to do (for example: the magic crystal & potion systems are mixed up in about 4-5 different scripts, I'll probably separate them into clear sections). And then I tried adding Robert's torso (remember Robert? he's been showing up in almost all our games since Myu made him exist over a year ago). And then it didn't work. (after a bit of digging I found out why: the model hadn't been exported from blender properly, and the gmae is a lil fiddly with the specific rotations & angles of the limbs since they all need to be exactly the same to work together nicely), that'll be fixed once they get re-exported.

Next steps on game 05 are : figuring out what needs retooling, making a list and a plan and then doing it. And implement the limbs Myu is making along the way. (here's a lil sneak peek)

And that's it so far for game 05. We're getting back into it. Myu should be a little more available so progress will feel a little less slow.

And now, time for somewhat of an announcement.

We've started working on game 06. And it's already looking like a BIG game for 2 people. We have a TON of ideas around it and I've done a bunch of lil tech tests and very basic prototyping to take my mind off the necrobuilder game for a lil while, and we're thinking about ways to maybe getting some sort of grants or financing for it, because it's still capitalism outside (I know, very annoying).

For that we'll have to re-tool our usual way of doing things, and make a REAL project doc that beefy and complete. Our weekly updates will not change, but there'll probably be less gameplay footage and more screenshots of concept docs and general thoughts.

We want to make a game that looks like it's cross-stitched.

(this is a very basic test using our logo. the colors are a lil blown out, but it works!)

Most of the past couple weeks has been figuring out how to (somewhat) efficiently render a million stitches and have them move around and what techniques to use.

And how to make art for it. We thought about making a tool first, but then I thought to look up existing cross stitch pattern makers (there's a free one called flosscross) and retro-engineer their export formats into something I could somehow translate into a godot scene. Their oxs export format is a basic xml file, which godot can read, and once I noticed that it was "just" a matter of translating the xml into positions & colors godot can read and apply them to a multimesh (a specific type of node in godot that's usually used for rendering grass or many instances of similar objects, like these stitches)

(look! they're actually 3D! which will hopefully allow us to do a bunch of cool stuff)

Anyway! Lots of cool things on the horizon. We'll see how it all goes, and you'll hear about it as soon as we know more!