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Devlog: Godot Game - Level 3-2 and a Rotating Platform
Starting to work on level 3-2, and adding a new rotating platform mechanic, with some thoughts on how to build it. Continue reading →
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Devlog: UCL - Adding Some Missing Library Functions
Adding some more string and list functions to UCL. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Godot Game - Working On Backdrops
Trying my hand in making some mountainous backdrops for world 3. Continue reading →
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Finally added some checkpoints to level 1-3. Also added some animated water as a new type of hazard. The asset pack I’m using came with a single “wave” tile. I used Aseprite to shift that across 4 cells and configured it as an animation in the tile set. I was planning to add some background waves too, but that made it a little too busy and hard to discern. Less is more here.
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A small devlog entry today. Just painting the level, adding background tiles and kill-zones. I also added a frame around the lift door, just to define it a little. Discovered that it’s probably best not to have sprites with non-even dimensions. It makes positioning them a little awkward, resulting in fractional offsets. I elected to include a transparent row at the top of the frame sprite, just to avoid this.
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Devlog: Godot Game - A Trigger That Reveals Secrets
A new mechanic has been developed to reveal hidden areas in a game when players approach, using an
Area2Dnode that fades tile layers in and out for a smoother experience. Continue reading → -
Devlog: Godot Game - More on Level 3-1
Placing the exit and adding an invulnerability power-up. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Godot Game - More On Level 3-1
Continuing level 3-1, plus adding some more elements to stop long falls. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Godot Game - More On Level 3-1
Continuing the build out of the new zone for level 3-1, plus implement a new variant of the balloon with mine entity. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Godot Game - The Back Third of Level 3-1
Redoing the back third of level 3-1 to be a closer match to the front third. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Blogging Tools - Podcast Clip Favourites
Finishing off the favourite podcast clips feature. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Blogging Tools - Podcast Clip Favourites
Working on saving podcast clips from Blogging Tools into a Hugo site, done in the “lab notes” running commentary approach. Continue reading →
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Bit more on lifts in Godot today. Re-engineered how the whole thing works: now everything is driven by the stationary lift doors. Each door has a reference to a lift and a target door. This makes the lift carriage itself rather passive: it will continue to reparent the player as before, but it no longer needs to track activations or have animating doors of it’s own. The doors just tell it where and when to go.
This has got proper targeting working so that a lift can now move between a pair of doors. It also allows for the player to call for the lift when it’s not positioned at the doors already. There are a few more dependencies amongst the various entities, but I think it makes for a more robust system.
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Small change to the thirst mechanic for my Godot project. Switched from discrete thirst levels to a single timer that will tick down if the player is thirsty. This allowed for a change to how I indicate this to the player, replacing text messages that’ll be displayed at each thirst level with a gauge that shows up on the HUD.
I thought that the messages would be enough, but after playing through with them, they turned out to be more of a hindrance. They didn’t communicate the player’s thirst level well enough: they show up for a few seconds, then disappear, leaving the player to wonder how much time they have. This information is now always present with the gauge. Plus, I think it gives more of a sense of urgency, in that a gauge that’s constantly ticking down will encourage the player to play a little faster in order to reach the next water bottle before they perish from thirst.
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More on that Godot project today. Finally bit the bullet and started working on proper backdrops. I’ve leaving the artwork until later (i.e. I’m procrastinating), today was all about the mechanics, trying to get parallax scrolling working. Fortunately Godot has built-in nodes to make this easy, although I did have to upgrade Godot to 4.5.
This is my first cut, some simple colour banding to represent sky and sand in one of the desert levels:
These two layers were added to the scene as Parallax2D nodes, each with a single Sprite child. Positioning the sprites was a little tricky. Godot suggests placing them at the origin, but what I didn’t understand was that the actual position of the sprite depends a lot on the scroll scale of the Parallax2D node. I added the sky layer without changing the scroll position and it took me a while before I discovered that it was appearing below the camera. Only after reducing the scroll scale to about 0.1 did it start showing up in the viewport (one nice thing about Godot 4.5 is that the “play scene” window includes debug options, allowing you to hijack the camera and move it around the scene).
I will need to introduce some detail in the backdrop layers soon. The bands are too simple and may induce some vertigo when the player is ascending to high platforms. Plus, it just looks boring. Not that they’re meant to be eye-catching but something a little more interesting would be nice.
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Small DevLog update today. Continuing to work on that Godot game. I got the bulk of the mechanics of level 2-1 built (it still needs dressing up), and I spent this evening mainly just play-testing it, and tweaking it. I think I may need to get someone else to play-test it though, just to make sure it’s not too hard. It’s significantly long, coming in at 10,560 units horizontally, and given how many new mechanics are involved, I’m a little worried about the difficulty curve. But I am happy about the mix of elements I do have. It doesn’t feel boring, which was the concern I had. There are some timing challenges, and I the pacing across the level feels fine. But I really should convince someone else to try it out.
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Devlog: Trying OpenAI Codex to Produce Freelens Logo Creator
Using OpenAI Codex to make a logo generator tool to allow customisation for different clusters in Freelens. Continue reading →
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Ah, MacOS’s locked-down nature strikes again! Was testing the CI/CD build for Dequoter and after downloading the artefact and attempting to open it, I got this warning message:
Turn’s out it was being quarantined by MacOS, and these instructions resolved the issue.
The binaries not notarised so I wasn’t expecting it to work out of the box. I was hoping that it would do that thing where the app will be listed in settings and I can allow it to launch from there, but I guess there’s something about where this file came from that was too much from MacOS. Ah well, I can live with this for the short term.
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Devlog: Dequoter — Something Different Today
A new project called Dequoter was started to unquote a JSON string and filter it, utilizing Go for backend functionality and HTML for the frontend. Continue reading →
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Starting to work on the background tiles. This is what I have so far. I hope it’s not too busy or distracting.
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Devlog: Godot Project — Bricks in Level 2-3 Laid
Just a quick update today. I’ve finished all the brickwork in level 2-3. And it didn’t go too badly. Made one significant mistake which would’ve involved a lot of rework, that I patched up with some single tiles: Top: the mistake. Bottom: the fix. Doing the rest of it was pretty dreary work. Godot does have some tools to make this easier, but there was no getting around the level of care needed to place the bricks correctly. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Shutting Down Nano Journal
With the move to Obsidian for my journalling needs, I shut down my bespoke journalling web-app. I deployed it on 26th August 2024, which makes it just over a year old. I did start using Obsidian on the 20th though, so it didn’t quite make it the entire year. Even so, not bad for something hand made and somewhat neglected. Most things I eventually abandon last way less than that. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Godot Project — Level 2-3 Update
Critical path for level 2-3 has been built. Continue reading →
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Devlog: UCL — Comparing UCL To Some Early Ideas
Comparing UCL to an idea for a hypothetical command language for a now-defunct CLI project, which aimed to combine shell-like REPL functionality with scripting capabilities. Continue reading →
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Devlog: Blogging Tools — All About Images
Some recent changes to Blogging Tools around images and image processing. Continue reading →