9/28/23

Time Worked: 2 hours, 10 mins

Today I got a grid system going for placing buildings. It was kool. I feel like I should do more but I also feel pretty solid with the work I put in today. We'll see.

Remaining tasks:

 - Make buildings unable to be placed on top of one another

 - Implement the Time Unit system

 - Allow the player to exit building mode

 - Figure out how to handle walls being targeted and destroyed

 - Program the mines to explode

Aaaaand a whole lot more. 

Here's a little GIF.  

9/27/23

Time Worked: 1 hour, 20 mins

I'm tired.

Had family stuff today so wasn't able to get to work at an optimal time. I still got some stuff done though. Just working on the building placement system.

9/26/23

Time Worked: 1 hour, 39 minutes

Did alright today.

It was a little hard to get started. I'm coming up on October which is kinda the deadline for this game at least in terms of making a decision. And I feel like I'm kinda confident that I've come to a decent place, where I know what I want to make. 

I've figured out the game loop or at least I have a proposed game loop which I feel will work well. It has aspects of several different games I enjoy and I think it is truly unique at least to my knowledge. Yeah yeah, of course there's nothing new under the sun, but at least I can't think off the top of my head of another game that's like this and that's good enough for me. I'm not concerned with being original, but I am interested in being at least somewhat unusual.

So yeah I just have to work on the building prototype now, which is gonna take a little playing with (fine). It was a slow start but I did start and that matters; tomorrow I will continue; and the day after that; and one day it'll be done. 

I'm just glad I played aggressively with things and I think that took me a good ways towards where I need to be. I wish I hadn't wasted time on the cover system for enemies, but whatever. Maybe it will come in handy later. I spent SO much time working on that; lol. It was neat, and I did learn a lot while doing it. But that's just the nature of things I guess. I think I should have had a little more foresight and realized it was a big time sink before digging into something like that.

Alright; well that's it for today. I know nobody reads this. Maybe some random dude. But hey; if you're reading this... just know that I'm trying and that's all we can do. We just gotta try our best, and who the fuck knows what will happen. Just fuck around and find out. A guaranteed way to fail is never to try in the first place. And there is no guaranteed way to succeed. So; fuck it man just do stuff.

Here's a pic of the game loop and some other notes I wrote while on a hunting trip.

9/16/23

 Did a lot tonight.

It's becoming more of a real-time strategy game. I like it a lot more this way and I'm kind of thinking about disabling the player.

Now you can click to select troops and move them. You can also click and drag to select multiple. They can be ordered to attack things.

Pretty cool man.

Just gotta keep motivation up and keep moving. Keep experimenting as hard and fast as possible. But don't burn out. Just make it happen. I don't know. I watched "Elementals" tonight and watched a documentary about how it was made afterawrds, and it was both inspiring and stress inducing - it made me think "can I really do this?" Like I guess because I know I'm not working 6 am to 11 pm on this and some people are. I'm just doing this when I can find the time.

But not everyone's story looks the same. And to be fair, I'm not trying to be a director for Pixar. I'm just trying to make games. And I'd love to make some money from it. But the money isn't a requirement. The requirement is to make it happen and produce things, and create experiences that others can enjoy and be inspired by.

I just want to show myself that yes, I can make games, and they can be fun. I want to see; if I really keep trying, and really don't give up, what will happen?

9/14/23

 Time Worked: I dunno prob an hour, hour and ahalf

Just worked on command mode today. Exciting stuff. Working smoother than I thought it would.

9/13/23

 Time Worked: Like an hour

Sooooo it's been rough lately.

BUT I'm back.

I've decided I gotta go back to the simple rule of "Just do it daily and it doesn't matter how much". I feel good. Alhough I wanna keep doing better but like one thing at a time. What really really matters is that I keep moving forward trying to make progress. Not that everything is nicely planned and organized and I'm making hits. What I really need to do is just keep working. Just keep making stuff. Enjoy it. Do it for the love of it, not for the hypothetical dream.

Live the life, don't just obsess about the dream.

Anyway today I am continuing on the idea I got from Designing Games about trying hard to experiment as quickly as possible and not giving a shit about longevity of code, because who the fuck knows if the features I'm developing are going to work together. So there's no reason to try too hard to keep things nice and clean (such as pull requests as I was doing earlier), it's more important to do things real quick and see if it works or what needs to be adjusted.

I guess I should just think, there's inevitably going to be stuff that gets thrown out the window and that's good. I need to aggressively find out for myself what is a waste of time and what is not before I devote time and try to run it like an established business.