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two-week project reportback
two-week projects! it's weird when i do them these days! the weight of unfulfilled history has crushed their structure!
for the first half of this month i did a little work on an ai scheduler, in the sense of a npc action/reaction system, not like, llm generative-ai stuff. this mostly had me reading a bunch of papers about GOAP and not getting an enormous amount actually done. i wrote a little demo, but it never really worked properly or modelled the world in the way i'd want it to work
the latter half of this month was a little bit more fruitful. worked on some game stuff. specifically, the posts over on my dev screenshots blog, from this one to this one. covering: rudimentary worldgen, drawing a bunch of tile sprites, adding jumping & drawing a jump sprite, and starting (but definitely not finishing) the lighting buffer. also i restructured the worldgen code so that it was fast again & i was back to getting 56fps on the moment of chunk load. actually keeping loading fast is something i care a lot about for this thing, since i would really like this to be practically playable.
as you may have noticed, i've kinda eased back from all the hell game 2 development, mostly because i'm pretty burnt out on writing porn right now & (if you recall) after i wrote the whole scene parser thing i was like, oh yeah, writing actual content for this would involve so much writing. which is why i started messing around with the map rendering code for several months instead. so this project may or may not be the thing i dig into for the next, uh, year-or-so; we'll see. it's certainly the thing i'm working on right now.
currently the idea is kind of a redux of 'the new hive', only with actual graphics and game mechanics. the 'world map' i dumped into the game for testing is a tweaked version of the one from 'the new hive'. you know, whitesand ash wastes to the southeast, acid sea to the south, glass mountain to the northeast, rusted ruins to the west, etc, that kind of thing. turns out it's a lot more work to actually generate and render all that in (isometric) 3d vs. just writing a few lines of description. i'm kinda considering to what degree i want it to be like, porn game vs. game with monstery porn elements vs. Standard Farming Sim Heart System vs. whatever else. i mean, some of my favorite scenes to write in the new hive were the ones where you explain to the gheist how human reproduction works / the ones where the human squad leader has to explain the concept of legal marriage and divorce to you, so like, regardless of explicitness there is gonna be a certain level of sexual weirdness. but also, all of that is still undecided b/c the game as coded does not have npcs in it yet. i'm hoping to add in buildings and caves soon.
the thing with text games is that there aren't really "assets" as such. most of this two-week expanse has just been the process of drawing landscape tiles & implementing them in-game. which is critically important! but it's not really as conceptually interesting as, like, plot & gameplay design.
overall, what i did is like... drew wasteland sand tiles. drew wasteland rock tiles. drew red sand tiles. drew white sand tiles. drew rust sand tiles. drew fused glass tiles. made half-slab variants for stone block. made half-slab variants for brown stone block, & drew rotated versions of relevant sprites. drew jumping sprites for the (default, demo) pc. drew some concrete sprites. drew a bunch of wooden wall & tiled roof sprites for buildings that aren't yet in-game. drew a bunch of rock and plant decor sprites that aren't yet in-game. and did a bunch of code stuff, but it really was mostly drawing stuff.
for the first half of this month i did a little work on an ai scheduler, in the sense of a npc action/reaction system, not like, llm generative-ai stuff. this mostly had me reading a bunch of papers about GOAP and not getting an enormous amount actually done. i wrote a little demo, but it never really worked properly or modelled the world in the way i'd want it to work
the latter half of this month was a little bit more fruitful. worked on some game stuff. specifically, the posts over on my dev screenshots blog, from this one to this one. covering: rudimentary worldgen, drawing a bunch of tile sprites, adding jumping & drawing a jump sprite, and starting (but definitely not finishing) the lighting buffer. also i restructured the worldgen code so that it was fast again & i was back to getting 56fps on the moment of chunk load. actually keeping loading fast is something i care a lot about for this thing, since i would really like this to be practically playable.
as you may have noticed, i've kinda eased back from all the hell game 2 development, mostly because i'm pretty burnt out on writing porn right now & (if you recall) after i wrote the whole scene parser thing i was like, oh yeah, writing actual content for this would involve so much writing. which is why i started messing around with the map rendering code for several months instead. so this project may or may not be the thing i dig into for the next, uh, year-or-so; we'll see. it's certainly the thing i'm working on right now.
currently the idea is kind of a redux of 'the new hive', only with actual graphics and game mechanics. the 'world map' i dumped into the game for testing is a tweaked version of the one from 'the new hive'. you know, whitesand ash wastes to the southeast, acid sea to the south, glass mountain to the northeast, rusted ruins to the west, etc, that kind of thing. turns out it's a lot more work to actually generate and render all that in (isometric) 3d vs. just writing a few lines of description. i'm kinda considering to what degree i want it to be like, porn game vs. game with monstery porn elements vs. Standard Farming Sim Heart System vs. whatever else. i mean, some of my favorite scenes to write in the new hive were the ones where you explain to the gheist how human reproduction works / the ones where the human squad leader has to explain the concept of legal marriage and divorce to you, so like, regardless of explicitness there is gonna be a certain level of sexual weirdness. but also, all of that is still undecided b/c the game as coded does not have npcs in it yet. i'm hoping to add in buildings and caves soon.
the thing with text games is that there aren't really "assets" as such. most of this two-week expanse has just been the process of drawing landscape tiles & implementing them in-game. which is critically important! but it's not really as conceptually interesting as, like, plot & gameplay design.
overall, what i did is like... drew wasteland sand tiles. drew wasteland rock tiles. drew red sand tiles. drew white sand tiles. drew rust sand tiles. drew fused glass tiles. made half-slab variants for stone block. made half-slab variants for brown stone block, & drew rotated versions of relevant sprites. drew jumping sprites for the (default, demo) pc. drew some concrete sprites. drew a bunch of wooden wall & tiled roof sprites for buildings that aren't yet in-game. drew a bunch of rock and plant decor sprites that aren't yet in-game. and did a bunch of code stuff, but it really was mostly drawing stuff.
