nion✨

Awkward date START!

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Editor scripts are this for me, especially since you can hotkey them in the command palette. Crazy I don't see it more because it can remove so much busy work in ways I dare not even conceive

It's a lesson that they'll learn eventually, but for those kinds of people, it won't be internalised until they fail, often repeatedly

I think the usual advice of scope-down etc is important and true, but it often doesn't connect with certain people.

To even try at all requires ambition that isn't rational. It won't resonate because for some folks, the point isn't to make the minimum, it's to make the thing haunting them at night

Lately, I've been building systems with much more specific goals in mind. Breaking the project into discrete units (quests, scenes, etc) and making things to facilitate that content specifically. Rather than the abstract idea of "game"

And it seems to be working, so far.

But with longer more ambitious projects the struggle remains. For me the goal or idea tends to be more abstract, less conducive to a quick prototype. At least, that's not what motivates me to work on it at all. So they become a collection of systems built over months without being a "game"

Game jams are good because the constraints leave no room for any superfluous systems (usually). I'd never finished a game before doing game jams

I've been thinking... 🧵

Making games solo is hard.
The problem space being so large, it's no wonder medium-large projects often get off track. I've often succumbed to the aimless making of systems that I feel should be in, rather than them being actually required.

Can't guarantee this is the best/optimal way to do this. But it works, and pretty closely achieves what the old system's showed. The script also handles stuff like tweening between different palettes.

To get the effect of darkening/lightening by discrete steps, I use a brightness variable in the palette script to "shift" the colours over in whichever direction I want by adding it to the referenced index of the palette.

A consequence of doing it this way is that the colours of everything in the editor is the greyscale "source" colours, which I don't particularly mind, and there's probably a way to represent it without setting the shader material on every sprite, but w/e.

The palette script handles setting the shader's input colours through global shader parameters, this is usually from pre-set palettes I have in a dictionary. I reference these by name and index. 0 for darkest and 3 for brightest

The palette shader is fairly simple. it's a screen shader that takes four greyscale source colours, matches them to the screen's colours, and then outputs the target palette colours.

Palette shader that shifts each colour over by a value set in code. In practice I just tween a float between -1.0 and 1.0 with 0 being default. As a bonus it can also go the other way, brightening the scene during certain events as well. Happy to go into it more if wanted

It's got everything the human body needs

Tempted to add an actual tiny chance to end up in a weird secret room that shows stuff "behind the scenes"

But I should probably draw the rest of the owl first

Thankss!! :)))

Teleportation magic (99.7% reliable)

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Finally coded the 'Me when I get you' spell

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Cool how even the simplest game suddenly gets extremely complex once you add real-time multiplayer

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Added fetch and repair spells. Maybe somethings can be broken again after repairing? 🤔

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Turn invisible to avoid statues?
and a magic particle effect because that seemed mandatory.

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hard pivoting this project to some sort of magic-imsim weird gameboy golden sun thing.

Writing internal thoughts for every NPC is probably a lot, but it's fine if you remember it's 90% sass.

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The more time passes the more I've started moving towards this way of thinking. I remember in my earlier projects i had an 8-dir animated player, of course every NPC and enemy had to be the same.
I naturally never finished those projects

The world is balanced by my innate desire to use as small a resolution as possible while also trying not to hurt my tired eyes on the sharp pixels

Many friends...

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Ahhhh damn it's the cops! Scatter, scram!

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Chaos

Remember to regularly scan your friends for malware!

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