Ross Karchner

So far it’s been four days since I and most of my colleagues were ordered not to work. I started the week getting over a cold, so didn’t do much of note Monday or Tuesday. Yesterday, I registered to take the AWS Security exam in April (my certification expires in May) and took a practice exam.

Will this last days? weeks? months? I have no idea.

Benjamin’s recent game jam entry is Rolling is Spinning. It gets pretty tricky at the end!

I did the coding, following his concept and directions. He also did the art/animation for the ball that represents the player.

The theme of the jam is “spinning”, hence the name, to remind the judges of that rolling should count as spinning.

• I’ve been helping my son on an entry for the Boss Rush Jam 2025– the concepts are his, most of the art is royalty free stuff from a humble bundle, and I do most of the coding and Godot-wrangling.
• I’m on the last project of Compete Godot 3D, which is a first person shooter. I’ve got a world to run around in, an enemy that follows me if I get too close, and a gun that can shoot then enemy and recoils when fired, and has a muzzle flash. There’s more to do, but it’s a satisfying project.

Every three or four years I get the urge to build a PC. Most of the time, the urge passes and I move on to other ideas/projects/what have you.

This time, I built the dang thing!

Component-wise, the most interesting part is probably the GPU– I was able to get my hands on an Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage!) and it’s spent the last two weeks sitting in my office, unloved. Last night, I trekked down to Microcenter to buy the rest of the computer and, after some drama (it took me a while to figure out where all the screws were, how to attach the CPU cooler, and that the motherboard wanted the 8 pin OR 8+4 power connection, but not BOTH), I have a nicely specced little PC next to my desk.

By little, I mean about the size of a mini-fridge. A “mid tower” is still pretty huge.

Battlemage support in Linux still has a ways to go. I decided to start with Fedora Rawhide, so I can get any improvements soon after they land in the kernel.

So far, I’ve been able to play some games that were unusable or pretty rough on my laptop (a circa 2016 Lenovo Carbon X1), and Godot is humming along nicely. The Abandoned Spaceship Demo was really jerky on the laptop, but runs on the new box like it’s no big deal.

Somewhere along the line, I told myself a story: Before making 3D games, I needed to learn 3D, as in get a handle on 3D graphics as a general topic, and perhaps develop some expertise in something like Blender.

From talking to people at gamedev meetups, it seems like maybe that story is nonsense?

To test that theory, I’ve been working on a Godot 3D tutorial and finding that things generally makes sense. Coming from 2D, I was surprised that:

• Up is positive, and down is negative (on the 2D canvas, it’s the other way around– like you’re always in the bottom right quadrant of the standard coordinate system, the origin is in the top left corner)
• I’m measuring things in meters instead of pixels.

Aside from that, the additional axis, and a new set of nodes to use, most of what I’ve learned about Godot still applies. So, in 2025, I’m hoping to make some 3D games.

And, maybe learn Blender.