Terry

What I’ve been working on recently

So, Mr. Platformer didn’t go anywhere. That’s fine, I’ve already started working on a new game! (It still feels a bit fragile, though, so I’m not ready to share anything about it just yet. Maybe next month.)

At this point, I feel like I should explain what I’m actually trying to do here? My process is basically just to churn through as many ideas as possible, and look for the ones that feel special. Most of my ideas go nowhere, which can be discouraging. But it seems like this is the only thing that really works for me.

My goal is to figure out what my next big game is. I really want to be working on that next big game!

My secret new project is pretty exciting. It’s already fun, and I have a lot of ideas I want to explore. I think, maybe, it could be that next big game. (They all could, though.)

I guess I’m doing Ludum Dare?

This weekend is Ludum Dare! I haven’t done one of these since 2020, but I’m excited to give it a go again, and test out some of the new skills I’ve been learning this year. Probably gonna make a 2D thing in Godot!

I don’t have the best track record with 48 hour jams – and these days, a weekend doesn’t feel like enough time to make something I’m happy with. I never even got around to finishing up the post-compo version of my last Ludum Dare entry (in the gif above) – maybe my standards are too high now, or something.

Which is really stupid, and I know it. I’m looking forward to making some absolute trash this weekend. A real bad videogame!

What I’ve been working on recently

Hello again! Not much to say this month, because I've mostly been on holiday. I'm doing bits and pieces of work in-between, and in-between that, I've been poking at a holiday project, which I've been calling Mr. Platformer. I mostly started this as an excuse to play around with GBStudio, which I've wanted to do for ages!

It came from brainstorming ideas that felt like a good fit for the constraints of a gameboy - the thing I'm playing around with here is flipping between two colours, and areas that let you swap between them. The weirdly non-obvious thing here is that you actually flip the colours around so that you're always on the background colour, which is way more exciting that just e.g. flipping the player colour around. I can't really articulate why this is - it just feels better.

What's the plan here?

So actually, this idea is one I've played about with before! Back in 2010, at a game jam in Cambridge, I did something very similar for a VMU themed jam - see the gif above! I didn't get more than a couple of rooms in to it, but I've always like the vibes here.

Honestly, I dunno if I'll finish Mr. Platformer? I'm sure it'll show up in something I make eventually, though.

What I’ve been working on recently

Aghhh. It really, really sucks when something promising just doesn't work out.

So, I decided to shelve the 3D game I've been working on recently. At first, this game seemed to have a lot of potential: I love how it looks, and I love how it feels to be in. I love the dreamlike feeling of exploring a 3D space with a lot of verticality.

But I've learned to trust my gut about these things by now, and this one just wasn't coming together like it should.

I thought about sharing a playable build; but I think it's a bit too wonky for that. So I just made a quick video instead:

Designing good levels for this was surprisingly hard. I was aiming for a particular kind of feeling here, and therefore had lots of rules about what I wanted to do (slow floaty movement; no enemies; a weird DOS energy mechanic that I was very attached to) and maybe too many constraints on what I didn't want to do. So progress was really slow, and lots of ideas didn't pan out.

Well, it was a fantastic learning project at least - I've learnt a ton of new stuff thanks to this! Maybe I'll come back to eventually, who knows.

And is this process in the room with us right now?

When I rebooted this whole monthly devlog thing, I knew at some point I was gonna have a post like this. Fact is, most of what I work on doesn't work out, which sucks! I've learnt to just accept it as "the process", because honestly I don't feel like I really have a say in it anyway. It's just how it works. Pfffftttttttt

Ok, well, back to the empty project file. I've got a clean slate now, which is exciting, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. See you next month!

What I’ve been working on recently

Hey, welcome back! It's a new year and I'm excited to get working on some new things! Or, you know, to continue working on the thing I started near the end of last year. Here's some screenshots I took today:

It's very much still a "I'm learning 3D!" project, but I think it's gonna end up being pretty fun.

This has been another month for just sitting down and learning new stuff, which takes forever, but is really starting to pay off. I've learnt more in the past couple of months than I have in years. There are things I know how to make now which I couldn't even consider making before!

As for this game: There's still a little way to go - I only have one finished level, and I want a lot more - but I'm pretty sure I'll have it all wrapped up by the time next month's blog post rolls around.

A crash course in 3D

Since the main thing I've been doing lately is watching tutorials, I thought I'd share my notes! The three main things I've been learning are Godot, Blender, and TrenchBroom.

For Godot:

I sort of learnt a lot of the Godot basics back when I made Triangle Run - since then, it's mostly just been practice and google. But I did put together a bunch of links in the "Where do I start?" section of the Stop Waiting For Godot jam page that's still worth a look! (It also gets into the "Why Godot and not X" question, if you're curious about that.)

The BEST Godot tutorials I've come across, though, are Miziziziz's series on youtube. I normally find video tutorials excruciating - but these are about as to-the-point as you can get. To an extent that's actually hilarious - be prepared to pause every five seconds to check what he's doing. These are probably no good if you're an absolute beginner, but if you have at least some experience with other gamedev tools, they're amazing.

For Blender:

Man, I wish I'd just learnt Blender sooner. Blender used to have a reputation for being impossible to learn, but these days it's actually great, and really intuitive to use.

The thing about Blender is; it's an extremely powerful piece of software, and you can do a lot with it - but to actually make 3D models for games, you only really to need to learn like, 8 things, and then you can ignore everything else.

Everybody recommends the Donut tutorial, and everyone is right: it's excellent. That's my donut in the gif at the top of this section! (edit: not everyone - turns out donut guy is a bit of a dickhead. That link has some details, as well as some alternative tutorial links.)

The first couple of parts cover the basics of mesh editing, and from there, it goes through a bunch of advanced features like shaders and geometry nodes and lighting. None of that later stuff is useful for what I actually want to make, but I found it fascinating to see the zoomed out view of what's possible with the tool - somehow it made the basic stuff less scary. The tutorial starts here!

For TrenchBroom:

TrenchBroom is my big discovery this month. It's an open source level editor for making Quake maps!

There is a plugin for Godot called Qodot, which lets you load in Quake .map files directly into the editor. Getting it all set up is unfortunately a little bit of a faff, but it's worth it because then you get to use TrenchBroom, and TrenchBroom is incredible. It's so much fun to use, and it's super fast to iterate on your work.

For actually learning to use TrenchBroom, you should check out the dumptruck_ds tutorials on youtube, which are a series of nice short 5 to 10 minute tutorials on getting up and running. It opens with the most reassuring 15 seconds I've ever seen in a tutorial, highly recommended.

(You can actually mostly skip through the first dumptruck_ds tutorial, since it assumes you're trying to make maps for Quake and mostly talks about setting that up.)

...

That about covers it! Hey, if you've got any other 3D tutorial suggestions, please drop em in the comments! I've still got a lot to learn here!