Today’s deck is the Witches Tarot.
It has more than just witches as it turns out. It’s really nice though, I was SHOCKED to read they were illustrations since they look like photo collages.
Today’s reading advices to keep emotions under control when facing dilemmas, which did come in handy in the day on a couple of things.
As the title and the newly formed Category shows, today I was FINALLY able to sit down and do some coding for a project.
In fact, if you’ve followed this blog since the start, one of the first recurring Bits I fell into was the frustration that I wasn’t able to even start this project despite me making all these plans about how I’d have a vertical slice in this much time and whatnot.
But I finally started and what do I have?
Riveting, I know.
So, before talking about that video, here’s the most basic replies to what might be crossing the mind of a few of you right now.
- I’m not involved with N1RV Ann-A, haven’t been for a long while.
- No that project isn’t cancelled.
- The new project’s name is Everyone’s Detective.
- N1RV Ann-A isn’t cancelled, it’s not my project, leave me alone.
- I’m not sharing the premise
- I’m not saying when it’s coming out
- In fact I’m only sharing the name because I don’t wanna blur out things in videos and I also wanna set a precedent early that it is our title.
- N1RV Ann-A isn’t cancelled, it’s not my project, leave me alone.
- It’s gonna be a simple narrative game, nothing ambitious scope or length-wise.
- It’s being made in Godot.
- N1RV Ann-A isn’t cancelled, it’s not my project, leave me alone.
- N1RV Ann-A isn’t cancelled, it’s not my project, leave me alone.
- N1RV Ann-A isn’t cancelled, it’s not my project, leave me alone.
No I don’t have a chip on my shoulder, I’m carrying a box of chips. Thank you for noticing.
Also as me talking about it here might suggest, this isn’t a formal announcement of any kind. This is just me sharing what I want to make.
Right, now that I’ve fended off the guys I made up in my head that have the cheek to actually exist sometimes. Let’s talk actual sincere gamedev stuff.
So it’s not a secret that the development of VA-11 Hall-A left me a burned out husk. Everyone’s Detective (which I’ll shorten to “Detective” moving forwards) is an idea that… to be honest only exists at this point because a friend I shared the idea with REALLY loved the concept and wanted to make it happen and make illustrations for it.
I have plenty of ideas I’ve shared with people but this one is the main one where the enthusiasm is so palpable that I wanted to make it happen as much for me as for them.
That made this project the most palpable one out of the other ones I have in mind and I decided to make this my learning experience. The point where I finally learn good work practices that let me release a full commercial product and not need 5+ years of recovery both physical and mental afterwards.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about how to tackle this development, in fact, I’ve had way too much time. I have everything from development pipeline to story in my head and the fact that I haven’t been able to sit down and work on it has been driving me INSANE.
Gameplay-wise this project is meant to be like the April Fool’s game we made ages ago. So with that in mind I’ve come up with the following steps to get to a vertical slice.
Before any of you ask: No, VA-11 Hall-A wasn’t made so neatly, so a lot of the learning process is also involving that mythical thing known as “pre-production”.
I chose Godot because I hate Unity with the passion of a thousand dying suns, and it has 3D capabilities so I’m futureproofing myself a bit more than if I was using Ren’Py (I love Ren’Py mind you).
The dialog framework is Dialogic and it’s great because it has everything dialog needs but it’s out of the way enough that I can get silly with it still.
Getting used to the engine I did the thing I’ve done for every engine I’ve touched from Ren’Py to GameMaker to Unity: “Make a button and make it so the button does a thing”.
It’s such a simple exercise but in the process you learn, without fail: how to call objects not in the scene, the basics of the scripting language, and the events system of the engine, amongst other things.
The biggest hurdle in learning Godot was wrapping my head around the fact that it’s an engine without “rooms” in the conventional sense. Instead a room is basically just one big object with a shitton of objects in it.
…I mean, that’s what a room is in the most technical sense in every other framework, but here they decided to forego the idea of a “room class” so to speak.
Once you get in your head that “scene” means “object” (not exactly but in practice yeah) and Node is just a big container, the way that the engine makes everything more modular feels more liberating, honestly.
One cool element I learned in the process was the “signal” function where one event can trigger another once a “signal” is emitted. There’s plenty of ways to do this and plenty of ways I’ve approached it, but for example in the video above Dialogic sends a signal on the end of dialog that a different script elsewhere triggers to make the “Continue” button show up.
In the past I’ve handled that but going “if the text doesn’t exist but also if the button doesn’t exist, but also-…” so having that option is super clean.
“But Fer, this engine also has that, it’s called-” Listen, I’m not a programmer, I’m someone that knows how to program. My focus is to make the thing work, not make it work elegantly, so my learning curve has not been and continues to not be normal.
By the way, the placeholder sprites are from Katuuland’s Original Dekapai Character Materials Vol. 3.
Aside from this I sorted some things in the house and I couldn’t pay the bills I mentioned yesterday because I was waiting for a couple of packages.
I should make a category for the entries that devolve into revies, now that I think about it.