As I move incrementally forward on my personal game project, I keep updating how I do things behind the scenes. The game is a top down, 2D, arcade style, game with a look that aims to hover somewhere in the mid 90s. So 2D pixel art, but run on hardware that can throw some graphical sparkle around. Except the game isn’t 2D and none of what you are looking at is pixel art. Under the hood, it’s all 3D models, skeletal animations, and shaders. In some ways, that is a more difficult task than making a 2D game with 2D graphics, but it also lets me get away with a lot that would also be difficult in 2D. Besides, I know 3D graphics and shaders. It’s sort of cool to have fun with those. Up until recently, the game included a bunch of flat polygons with textures on them as a stand in for the tile based graphics of a lot of older arcade and console hardware. For a few reasons I have removed all of those textures and now everything in the game is actually flat-ish, shaded polygons. Again, some of the things I am doing to create the art might be easier with textured polygons, but this shaded polygon approach also lets me get away with some effects and animations that would be very difficult any other way. Making each tile or prop object is pretty quick and easy, and there are a load of Blender and Godot tricks that I am using to make 3D models look like 2D sprites. One day I will probably do a whole write up on how the graphics in my game get drawn to the screen, but for now, I think I will stick to working on getting more systems into a playable state. My hope is, once people are actually able to play it, they won’t much care how the pixels are being lit. They will just want to run around and interact with the world.

For the last few weeks I have been plunking away on a Discord Bot. The plan was for this to be a simple little thing. A sort of management agent for a group game critique. It keeps track of games that people want to suggest for critique, creates polls to gage interest, schedules critique events, and, with any luck, does all of this with very little effort. Of course, all of that might sound simple, but this involves python coding; something I’m familiar with but not to any sort of proficiency. It also involves hosting the thing and administrating a Linux server; something that I have a little more experience with. I did what anyone trying to set up something like this would do. I went out and found examples on GitHub and stole that code. If you have never written any code, I can’t begin to tell you how far you can get just by stealing some code. First, you see how someone else did the thing you are trying to do. Or a similar sort of thing at the very least. Second, you can break it without worrying too much that you won’t be able to fix it. You already have a working copy to refer back to. So I took my stolen code, mashed that more into the shape I was looking for, and then I set the AI on it. I have said before about using ML agents to work on code. I think it works really well if you already have a working thing that you want to clean up, optimize, or add features to. In this particular case, it worked extremely well. Since Discord bots are a pretty well understood topic, and I wasn’t attempting to do anything really wild, I was usually able to tell Copilot to look at a feature I already had working and extend it or create a new feature based on it. I went from having a little poll creating bot that read out of a database I hosted, to having a fairly full featured, not terribly ugly, critique management system, while only really working on it a few hours over a handful of weekends. Now I have to let some actual people mess with it and break it.

It’s a funny thing, when you go back to edit older stories. You notice things that you missed the first few times around. The terrible parts stand out, of course. Stark and prickly. It’s hard to say why you ever wrote them in the first place. It’s easy to yank them out by the roots to make way for new sentences that fit the flow of the story much better. Well, maybe not easy, but doable.

Best Games - Double Dragon Double Dragon is all about player expression. Before Double Dragon the variety of game character movements that you could expect might be a jump, maybe a shoot or punch action. Some games might even contain contextual action like climbing a ladder or interacting with part of the level. Never much more than that.

Thankful today for all the people who are, and have been, in my life.

I’ve done a lot of driving recently. Well for some of it I wasn’t driving. I was just a passenger. Either way, I have spent a lot of time out on stretches of the flattest, baldest prairie that you could imaging. Just endless miles of unpopulated farmland stretching out to the horizon. Here’s the thing though. That might seem terribly boring, but it really isn’t. I really do live in a very beautiful part of the planet. We watched the sun set multiple times over the last couple of weeks. Not just the twenty minutes or so that the sky turns red orange. The entire sunset, from wickedly bright afternoon to complete darkness. And out on the empty prairie, complete darkness can be pretty damned complete. We stopped to watch the northern lights dancing behind thin clouds. I looked up at the night sky and saw the sweeping arc of our galaxy. I watched dust clouds kicked up by combines finishing the harvest drift across the road in front of me. I drove past golden fields of barley that hadn’t yet been cut. All of that is incredibly beautiful. I used to think that where I grew up and lived was dull. Generic. But it was only generic to me, because that is where I live. I think a lot of people would think that the idea of driving for several hours without passing even a small town might sound boring. Like there is nothing worth looking at out there. That’s just not true. Where I live is amazing. It’s nice to remember that sometimes.

This hasn’t been the easiest week. I’ll likely write something longer next week.

A few years ago I wrote about riding my bike. At the time, I rode my bike most places. I still do, but maybe not quite as often. I might not ride as often, but I think I ride more than I ever did before.

I like to use processes to create art. A while ago now, I came up with a method of creating a certain type of stylized art. It involves a set of layers interacting with each other in specific ways, but beneath all of that sits a regular old layer of pixels that you (or more specifically, I) paint onto to create the final look.

Best Games - Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount What’s the dumbest thing that you can think of to build a game around. Whatever it is, it might not be dumber than Porrasturvat.

we are flying back after dropping our oldest son off for his first year of university. I found myself thinking about this older post (423) that I wrote several years ago.

I’m a bad programmer. I have written similar sentiments here before, and I likely followed up those comments with the same explanation that I will add here. Like I said, I’m a bad programmer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t program. I have written a fair number of computer programs in several different languages. I have written programs that convert data from one format to another. I have written library software for a large company. I have written enemy ai code for small games. And the list goes on and on. All of these programs worked. Most of them were bad. Badly optimized, badly structured, and badly maintained.

I recently finished the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If you haven’t played the game and are spoiler averse, maybe you should just skip this one. I’m going to use this game as an example, but it might get a little bit spoilery.

Best Games - Devil’s Crush There have been a lot of video pinball games. I’m talking video game simulations of traditional pinball here, not just pinball machines that incorporate some video elements. Most of the early ones were bad. Some of the new ones are quite good. 3D Pinball Space Cadet that came free on a lot of versions of windows is actually very good (but we will get to that one another time). But most of them have one tragic flaw in common. They are trying to be pinball.

I just finished reviewing a whole raft of other peoples stories. you might think that it’s difficult to write a story, but trying to constructively critique other peoples stories is so much more difficult.