A Plan

The past few weeks I've not written about what I've doing, and that's because I've changed direction again. But I have a plan that I am trying to stick to, and it means there's lots of small projects that will be playable in the near future.

With Adventure Game shifting from 2D in MonoGame to 3D in Unity, and then the project getting busted by Plastic SCM screwing me over, I decided I don't trust new things. I attempted to pivot the MonoGame project to 3D and successfully had models rendering and cameras moving, but that fell apart when I attempted to put some water in the game.

I didn't pour a glass of water over my computer - I found some old projects from when I was at University that were the result of following the tutor's slides which he'd pieced together by copy-pasting some tutorials. One of these was a basic scene consisting of a skybox and a seemingly endless ocean, although in reality the end of the ocean would have been found extremely quickly once camera movement was added to that project.

Using that code, I attempted to implement it in Adventure Game but it didn't work. I then tried to follow another couple of tutorials online, but neither of those worked either. The code sort of made sense to me, so I assumed the issue was with the shaders. I've got basically no knowledge of how shaders work so I have no idea if the reason the water won't appear is because I did something wrong in there, or because I've done something silly in the code.

(Thinking about it when writing this, the models are all at a ridiculously high scale, so it may be that the water is at regular size and is too small to be seen. Although I'm fairly sure I chucked some high numbers at it)

Story Game progressed to a point where I needed to write the story and come up with puzzles, and my brain decided it didn't want to do that. But it had decided that I'd try to finish a project each month while Story Game developed alongside them.

These projects being finished doesn't mean I'm releasing a game every month - the plan is to get 4 finished and then release them weekly in what I'm calling the Month of Games. The final game was supposed to be Story Game, but that was starting to look less likely to happen until I came up with a new idea, which was actually just a rehash of an idea I'd had earlier this year but couldn't figure out how it was going to work.

While messing around with GitHub Pages, I've also managed to get a Blazor project setup which means I can create a website using C# code instead of Javascript, which potentially means I can use a library I have written to make a web game instead of having to port it.

A few months ago when I originally set out trying to juggle Halloween Game and 3D Game, I was aware that making 2 games simulatenously sounded crazy, so it seems even crazier that I am now juggling even more games and am mostly on top of them (although in fairness, these are smaller in scope).

One of them is mostly built. There's 4 things left on the ToDo list, one of which is populating it with a lot of data which is going to be incredibly time consuming, and I'm not even sure I can gather enough data to reach the target. I could attempt to write some tools to automate that, but I think writing the tools is going to take longer than manually populating the data.

Another is causing a bit of a headache. It's stuck in the final 10% phase and no matter what code I write, one of the mechanics just does not work properly. While I could cut out a part of the game, that mechanic is still needed for something else. I was planning on releasing this one first, but I might have to shift things around.

There is another project that I thought would be a pain, but then I decided to write some debug code to draw some boxes to the screen to show me where hidden things were and it made it so much easier for me to fix bugs now I was able to see what specific parts were broken. I'm hoping that the impact on the setup doesn't break too much once I redo all the art. I was planning on doing a mobile release for this, but was struggling for a while since it refused to load any of the audio assets. Once that was sorted, the touch controls were not doing what I wanted them to do. The mobile build is playable now though, so everything just needs a polish.

And another project is at the end of Phase 1, where it has been for a few weeks. It's possible to play, with some caveats, but I need to slam on it hard before I can finish Phase 2 which I decided to plough on ahead with until I reached a point where Phase 1's incompleteness was a total blocker. I even managed to write and finish a tool without being left traumatised, which meant I could start and finish Phase 3 before finishing the rest.

Maybe once I'm done with all these I'll have come up with the story for Story Game, but I'll see when I get there. I might have to end up making the game my auntie wants me to make where you go around pushing people down stairs. Thinking about it now, using ragdolls and finding ways to launch them down the stairs besides simply standing behind them and shoving them would probably be really fun.