Planet of the All My Apes Gone
This morning I was thinking back on some videos I’ve watched (like this) about abandoned NFT games, and it occurred to me that such a virtual world might be a compelling setting for a new game.
A world of half-built and/or I’ll-conceived villas and islands, bugs (exploitable?) that will never be fixed, bad algorithmic art, a massively deflated in-game currency. Everything you see was put there by VC, whales, crypto true believers, speculators, scammers and dupes.
Any random Molly White blog post could be a plot line.
Finished Listening: The Sign of the Four by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 📚
So, I had a serviceable puzzle game. The feedback in the Karchner household was pretty much:
That’s boring. You should make the game less boring.
So now, the puzzles are a minigame in a larger… duck….quest.. thing. I wouldn’t exactly say it works. But it kind of works?
I still like the puzzles.
I’ve updated the deployment pipelines for Pong Wars and the current WIP to use Godot 4.3.
While I was at it, I updated the Pong Wars pipeline to push directly to itch.io. Previously, it was an iframe pointing to the Github Pages version, which never looked quite right.
Despite previous predictions, I haven’t gotten a chance to work on improving the art and adding sound, music, polish, etc yet. I’ve got until 4pm Sunday to make improvements.
But, I can at least call it a game now! There are three puzzles. I think that’s enough for a jam entry.
Currently reading: Policy as Code by Jimmy Ray 📚
Finished Listening: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle 📚
(I’m actually listening to Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection, read by Stephen Fry– which is as excellent as you would suspect. At 72 hours, I’ll probably be listening to this into 2025.)
It’s not a game yet– but it’s interactive! By tomorrow night, I should be able to have a couple of playable levels, and that will leave me most of a week (including the weekend) to focus on improving the graphics, adding sound, and other fit-and-finish work.
A feeble #screenshotsaturday for my Godot Wild Jam work in progress. The current idea is something like Pipe Mania meets Snap Crcuits. This screenshot does not convey any of that, but I did get to the point where the game can detect whether a complete circuit has been made and react accordingly.
The theme is out for Godot Wild Jam #72. It’s a good thing I spent time last night finally figuring out how to make 2D lighting and shadows work…
I decided to dip into Threads a bit over the last few days: it’s mostly people talking about Twitter, Elon Musk, and the new Deadpool movie.
One of those things is interesting to me, but I can wait until it’s on Disney Plus.
GWJ72
When I was writing this post, I almost committed to sitting out game jams for a while, in order to focus on a small number of longer-term projects. Honestly, I could use some momentum right now, and I feel the most momentum after finishing a game jam.
So, I’m signed up for Godot Wild Jam 72.
This time around, I’m going to try to make a really simple game, and focus on the visuals and providing a quality, polished experience. In other words, I won’t try to design a whole-ass magic system.
(though thanks to a recent humble bundle, I’m looking forward to diving in to Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice.)
Finished reading: In Perpetuity by Maria and Peter Hoey 📚
Finished Listening: How To Write Funny by Scott Dikkers 📚
Switched the blog theme to Sumo by Matt Langford.
Finishing up Godot 4 Shaders: Craft Stunning Visuals, here are some 3D shaders:
I’m enjoying Kaan Alpar’s Godot Shaders course, and finished the 2D section last night. In this video, the animated background, greyscale, distortion, dissolve, masking (the spiky block) and re-colored trophies are all achieved with shaders.
Currently listening: How To Write Funny by Scott Dikkers 📚