Alright,... Let's take it again, right from the top.

As usual, real life has been busy (a lot more than usual). No real progress has been made in terms of putting out a game, no surprise since I changed game engines on top of everything else.

Since my last post I figured out some of the issues that I was having with Godot, mainly the animation system. Now I'm good with it. It seems that animate sprite and the animator are two independent entities and can work together or separate, but the tutorials I did made it feel that it was necessary to use both. I also found a way to show variables in the editor.

So I'm a lot more familiar with how the interface of Godot works. That doesn't really help me with scripting though, and the tutorials available on YouTube are what you would expect. Thankfully I found out about a course that was in the works. It's being created by a user that goes by the name Gdquest. I helped crowd fund it, so I'm in line to get a copy when it's released. He is currently working on the finite state machine, and it's a concept that I never really learned when using Unity. But it looks like it's going to save me a lot of headaches and problems if I learn how to make and implement it.

And for some sad news warped in some good news, Blender doesn't seem too interested in supporting NPR (none photo realistic) rendering in their new engine (Eevee). I won't be switching Blender versions anytime soon. Thankfully the NPR community seems to be working/trying on a solution for this problem.

That's it for now, so I'll end this with a familiar picture that now has a not-so-familar re-rendering to it!

Waiting for Godot.... Or was Godot waiting for me?

Hey all (anyone that comes here + empty space).

It's pretty obvious that I haven't been doing a heck of a lot in the last few months. Well I'm finally bored with playing games, so now I'm back in a (try) make one, frame of mind.

As I'm sure those of you that use Unity already know that they have finished its final 5th life cycle and now plan to move to a subscription based model. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not a fan of the new model. The new model makes it twice as expensive for people like me that have no interest in developing for mobile platforms. Anyway, what's done is done. Now that it's March, Unity will find out if their master plan was as good as it sounded on paper. If you ask me, I think their “new” CEO finally EA'ed the company.....

So I finally decided after some consideration that I should probably be looking into a new game engine (for a backup if anything). Unity is great, but I don't like the path the company has taken and I suspect that this is a prelude to, more “fun” to come.

Looking around the web I got the typical big name engines and a few unknown(ish) ones. I finally found a post somewhere were someone mentioned an engine called Godot. What I found was a free open source engine that pretty much fit nicely next to Blender in terms of available. So with nothing to lose I gave it a go.

The interface resembles Unity somewhat, but took me a while to get use to making a full scene that functions similar to how prefabs worked in Unity. Although this engine could use quite a bit more polish, I think it's the diamond in the rough I was looking for. While it's definitively usable, I kind of feel a few things could be improved on. I'm still fairly new to Godot, so some of this could be my own lack of knowledge on the engine.

-Exposed variables and adjusting things during run time: maybe there is a way to do this in Godot, but in Unity it made debugging and tweaking a lot easier as you could outright see what was going on under the hood while your game was running, and make tweaks without having to relaunch over and over again.

-The animation player: while it is usable, it feels a bit buggy and funky, the FPS setting when inserting your clips feels/is broken as I didn't notice any speed difference when adjusting the value. You can still adjust the time in second value during key frame insertion to change the frame rate. But it would be nice to adjust the FPS value instead of stretching/squishing the timeline.

Those are pretty much the two major things that I had some issues with. Some other minor stuff that I won't bother to get into right now. Overall though, this is a surprisingly good engine, and who can argue about the price/contract?

So~~~~

As of right now I'm in the process of learning how to script in GdScript and generally how to do all the stuff I learned to do in Unity. Thankfully my time in Unity wasn't wasted as I'm having a much easier time learning to use this one. On top of that, this engine has a somewhat simpler layout compared to Unity. It's tilling system is far superior to Unity IMO (Note: haven't tried the latest Unity build yet, but I suspect it won't be as good as Godot judging from screenshots)

My current goal is to remake that god awful platformer I made in Unity, Cat Attack!!! FFFF&M. Hopefully I can improve it more this time around :)

No moar tilz!

I've been steadily working on tiles for the current project.

They are kind of meh, but they will do for now. I still need a few more transitions and some cover tiles to give variety. But things are going good overall, which is surprising considering that I usually start to run out of steam when the day job starts.

I got enough tiles right now to at least make a few areas that I have in my mind, and I made a couple of low level enemies to start off with. (still have to animate and print frames)

Drew up a rough draft for what kind of functionality I want in this game, some of the stuff I already did in one incarnation or another, but some will probably take time to learn how to script.

Anyway, Nutaku announced that they will assimilate the previously dying Kimochi and use it as a service similar to steam. Even though I'm still ways off from having anything worth while, it still makes me happy to know that there is a real possibility this could end up being my next job!