Had a busy work week, but I managed to squeeze in some time to draw tile art for the prototype I mentioned last week. I found an old overworld tileset that I once made with 8 x 8 tiles, and I redid them in 16 x 16. I focused on tile art that has a simple, clean look to it...and I've been sticking with the "Dawnbringer 32" palette that I've used on my other game. I find that my tile art and pixel art tends to be a lot better when I work with a limited palette, since it prevents me from going overboard with colors. The target resolution for this is 320 x 180, which scales well to HD resolutions and covers an area that the images below show (It won't be this small though!)

While trying to complete a game, it's generally a big mistake to work on something else in the middle of development. I'm mainly doing this diversion to make myself feel better about not passing up the chance to do something new and potentially fun.

So...I did a rough mock-up of an RPG battle system idea that is partly from a dream I recently had. This has nothing to do with the game that the majority of this blog has detailed, but I felt the need to do this so that I don't lose track of the idea.

Here is my strange dream-induced vision (no hallucinogens involved):

This combines a classic turn-based battle system with an embedded platformer/auto-runner.

The basic idea is that the characters and monsters(or opponents) in the turn-based battle system have auto-runner counterparts in the embedded platformer display. Whoever is the next to reach the flag in the center gets to do a turn-based action.

Powerups may appear and be retrieved along the way, and several other realtime actions can happen too prior to reaching the flag (some of which could disrupt the opposing runners). After reaching the flag and performing an action, the runner gets sent back to their group's starting position and runs towards the flag again.

I've got the urge to do a prototype of this...so I might just do that. I know this is the game dev equivalent of being distracted by a shiny object, but right now I do this stuff for fun.

Looks like it's been 18 days since my last update. I've removed the "Gruedorf" from my dev log since I haven't done weekly updates. But I'll continue to post on this devlog.

A big part of the reason I haven't updated in a while is because I was focusing on my day job a lot. The company I joined about a month ago is heavily focused on microservices, so I had to spend lots of time getting up to speed on various technologies on their large tech stack. I think part of the problem was the previous company I worked at was on relatively older technology(not to say it's bad though) that's becoming more of a niche. Regardless, I think I'm at a much better spot now in terms of knowledge gained and keeping up with modern trends.

Started back up on game dev again but nothing interesting to report yet. I'm picking up tasks from my Trello board which is mainly some enhancements. One of which is to fix an issue with the minimap disappearing during a room scroll transition, due to the way I coded it as a component attached to a map. This ruins the sense of progression from one room to another.

My day job took up all my time the past week. And I also visited my sister-in-law and family in Colorado this weekend, so no progress on game development.

I ended up spending what little free time I had playing Horizon Zero Dawn some more. I can't say exactly what it is about this game that draws me in. Conceptually it's very similar to other open world games I've played in the past, but it could be the uniqueness in the setting and enemies. Also playing around with the override mechanic is fun.

I guess an important point is that more novel concepts can be a refreshing change in a sea of similar games.

This week I drew more pixel art. Mostly trees and shrubbery (ones that look nice and aren't too expensive!).

I've also been working on various ways to get plants to sway in the wind. One possibility is a vertex shader, and the other is using rotation/scaling along with tweens. I'm trying out the vertex shader approach first. I have yet to get anything working, but hopefully soon.

This week I finished a slime animation that looks really squishy (what I showed a pic of last week).

Other than that I mainly took a break and played Horizon Zero Dawn since it was a free download and something I've been meaning to try out but never did. I tend to rarely finish open world games due to the time commitment required, but it was fun and interesting.

This week I spent some time getting Nez working with FNA instead of Monogame. I'll probably use FNA going forward, though if needed I can switch back to Monogame fairly easily.

I also played around with the Dear ImGui integration that Nez has for debug panels. This is a feature that I wished I had used earlier because it probably would have saved me a lot of time. It lets me change change scenes or update properties of various entities and components at runtime(or even add new components to entities), which allows me to instantly see the results of tweaking these values. Previously I'd keep modifying code and rebuilding to test out the effects of property updates...which seems really silly now looking back on it. Nez also allows wiring up custom ImGui windows which I probably will make use of for debugging.

The pinnacle of my development this week was drawing a ... drumroll ... dead tree! (Maybe it's a visual representation of my free time this week ).

There will be some weeks where I get a lot done, mainly when I get a boost of inspiration. And some weeks where I just draw varying amounts of things. So goes the timeline of a hobby project.

This week was another week of pixel art and tile art. More tiles mean more graphics variety which means the player will get less bored looking at the same patterns! Nothing to show yet...because it's all just a bunch of random tiles that will eventually come together.

Lots of non-game dev stuff happened that took away more of my time. One of which was interviewing at and getting a new job for various reasons.

This week was PI planning at work (a scaled agile framework concept), so I didn't have much free time this week.

But I did manage to do some tile art