I'm still standing!
I'm still standing!
Throwing Pixels #7 — Indie Game Dev Adventures
I'm still standing! Yeah, yeah, yeah!
—I’m Still Standing, Elton John
I'm certain many of you hobbyists and not-yet-game-dev-full-timers understand when money-bearing projects call. Well, I gotta answer that call. However, this project doesn't go on the back burner. I touch it every day in some manner: Drafting notes, playing with minis on a table to visually work out mechanics, and reading other developers like Mike Acton. You know the mantra 'No Zero Days' My GTD project line item reads 'Proof of Concept demo by 2024 Q4.'
feature/mmmm_autochess
I'm still playing around with the combat cycle. I've got two implementations I'm playing with. One is an old-school D&D-inspired phased system. Magic, Movement, Missles, and Melee ordered actions. The cool thing here is I can swap around the order to see how things behave! This being a Wizard game, I think Magic should go first! But play may show me otherwise!
The other is stolen from a game called Shinobigami, in which an initiative value/zone hybrid called a plot is chosen and then revealed. Actions resolve high zones to low zones. I implemented this first and am still returning to playing with it. I like it, but nostalgia tugs at me hard toward the D&D phase system, too!
I've got my bullet journal with many pages of thoughts I need to move into my digital Obsidian notes. I'm constantly looking at the art styles of other games and pining them on my Pinterest. I don't know what mine looks like quite yet—pixel art vs. hand-drawn. Do I use Spine to animate? 🤷🏾♂️ I’ve been admiring Daniel’s Maps on Patreon —evocative stuff!
I was supposed to load up Defold to experiment with, but I found Odin and mucked around with it for a couple of days. I dig it, I do. But I'm not sure I'd give up C++ for it, and that may be nothing but habit and comfort. Defold and Haxe/Heaps are on my to-review short list.
The folks over at Biteme Games have a nice inspirational video(below) about Gamedev roadmaps I enjoyed watching. I stumbled on it while listening to folks debate the merits of Entity-Component-Systems in indie games. I think I'm falling in line with it being a compression tool, and as a small indie game, I likely don't need it. There's a lot of heat on this topic though! Most of my current prototype logic uses the Command and Component patterns defined in Robert Nystrom’s book Game Programming Patterns. Great stuff, easy to read.
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid!
—I’m Still Standing, Elton John
Catch ya next sprint!