What's been going on in Snowdrama Land?

John 'Snowdrama' July 14, 2024 [Blog] #Update

TESTING!

I'm back hopefully for good this time!

So recently I wanted to start blogging again because I've been feeling like just kinda ranting about stuff. Nothing major just... well it's been a while since I posted something I wish I could get more consistent but life doesn't want that. My last post was almost a YEAR ago.

We will get more regular posts this year if it kills me. I now have a calendar notification and I'm going to write at least something every other week on Sundays when I'm not doing Tabletop Game Night with friends.

Where are we now?

I've done a few Ludum Dares, did a few other jams, met some people, and lost some people due to just being terrible at communication. It's been pretty uneventful.

As for the project, where was I? *reads my previous blog post* Ahh yes, sorry memory is really bad. So I was thinking about that adventure game, that got put on hold OBVIOUSLY it was way too ambitious. So I started looking into new ideas and playing with a lot of prototypes.

Since then I've done 2 Ludum Dares with the usual crew and the Pirate Software Jam with some new people. I'll set an alarm to remind me to talk about those later this week.

Right after that blog post, I started experimenting with moving away from Unity. I did some FNA, did some MonoGame, and got into Godot finally after trying and failing a few times, and I've managed to stick with it so far.

I'm currently working on a project in Godot that I'm pretty happy with, I think mechanically it's within my grasp, a lot of the actual mechanics are built but I'm still trying a few more before I lock-in. It also has some great concept art and prototype art, and I'm homing in on something that fits nicely. I don't want to talk TOO much about the game yet, just because not announcing it keeps up my excitement making me want to work on it more!

Godot?

I wasn't a fan of Godot before, I struggled just because using it felt... well bad... But Godot 4 got a lot better C# support and now it feels really good. So I finally stuck around and gave it an actual try.

Godot has one massive benefit for me which is that like other open-source engines, licensing isn't something I have to be worried about and that's big. Unity always had me feeling uneasy because I'm an indie dev, and Unity the company has made some choices that never sat well with me.

Focusing on tools for film, augmented reality, medical, engineering, and military applications,
Focusing on creating tools for improving AAA with DOTS and HDRP
Charging $40 a month for Plus is the only way you can get the dark mode editor
Needing Plus to remove the "Made with Unity" splash screen.

All this while still not fixing basic pain points for everyday indie devs. Tack on that I'm not a great business person and I often worry about the engine license cut if my game made any money(yes I know I'd have to make like $1m for it to even matter but... It's still something I thought about)

I'd rather not have to deal with it hence Godot.

Funny enough, literally 2 months after trying Godot again due to the Godot 4.0 beta builds Unity does the whole "Runtime Fee" thing, only strengthening my concerns, and driving me away even faster.

Is Godot perfect? Absolutely not, it has a ton of really weird things that it does that I don't get, but most of them I have overcome. In the short time, I've learned a lot, and if/when Godot 4 finally solves the C# web build stuff It'll probably be my go-to engine for at least a while.

A maze generator I built with Godot

What about FNA?

I love some FNA, and I want to dig back into it. That said lacking any kind of visual editor due to it being a framework and not an engine hurts my productivity. I'd likely need to do a TON of custom tooling to get to a point where I'd be happy doing level design in FNA.

So for now I plan to stick with Godot, FNA is something I'd only really WANT to tackle with my whole team, and right now I think everyone who'd be on that team is busy with their own things, but that's life. FNA is a place where I'd need help, I'm really a jack of all trades so I don't feel I have the programming skills to really dive fully into a framework-only game, I'd struggle without that GUI interface for hooking things up haha. So for now I'm sticking to Godot while it's mostly me working on things.

A compromise I'd be happy with and that's using LDTK or Tiled as a proto-editor. Since we'd likely be doing 2D games with FNA, LDTK is a good tool for doing 2D levels. I've also used Tiled, and while I like LDTK better it seems to be oriented towards Top Down and struggles with games that have sloped tiles. Specifically, auto-tile rules with slopes are my main pain point, Tiled handles them better, but LDTK setting up auto-tiles with slopes is kind of painful, but this may be just a skill issue on my part haha

Life Updates

Working mostly, I'm still working the job as a front desk receptionist for a massage therapy studio. It's not a bad job, very chill which is something I needed after everything, I still have trauma from the job before and I can't even think about working something that was more taxing. In my current capacity though, it's not really sustainable long term, so right now, I'm trying to save as much as I can while I have the amazing support of those around me keeping me housed and fed.

Things have shifted as I think more about where to go in my game dev journey attempts.

I'll probably do some other posts about some of the non-game-dev projects I've been doing, stuff I've been doing in my time away from the PC and such. I've been wanting to get back into video editing and content creation. We'll see how it goes, for now, I'll work on a single full year of blog posts and see where I feel in 3-6 months.