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Game Dev - March 2023 Summary
2 years ago
I've posted a game dev monthly in a while, mainly because I've not done much, if any, game dev. I got back into it mid march, but there's been setbacks.
Godot 4 got an official release, so I've ported my Halloween jam FPS to that. It required only a few lines changed. I also got the AI working with proper pathfinding. It recalculates every physics frame which isn't ideal, but it's good enough and shouldn't be a problem for a game this simple. There were a bunch of problems along the way, things like the navigation breaking because the height of the "agent" node was set too low. Easy to fix but required a lot of trial and error to diagnose.
The current big problem is the 3D modelling software I'm using, Crocotile3D, doesn't have proper support for animations. It has rigging, and you can do animations (including UV animations) but they don't import into Godot well. I have options of what to do. From using different software like Blender, to making the game without animations, but for now I've put that part of the project on hold until I figure out what to do.
Sound is another problem. I don't know much about sound production and horror style games rely heavily on sound. There are sound libraries ranging from free stuff to paid, but I'll likely still need to edit them.
Finally, I've been considering making a game for "old" hardware. There's been something of an explosion in Megadrive homebrew recently, supposedly due to the release of some good tools. Another interesting bit of hardware is the Commodore 64-like computer Commander x16. I can detail my thinking in another post if people want that, but in short the technical limitations could make for an interesting side project.
Godot 4 got an official release, so I've ported my Halloween jam FPS to that. It required only a few lines changed. I also got the AI working with proper pathfinding. It recalculates every physics frame which isn't ideal, but it's good enough and shouldn't be a problem for a game this simple. There were a bunch of problems along the way, things like the navigation breaking because the height of the "agent" node was set too low. Easy to fix but required a lot of trial and error to diagnose.
The current big problem is the 3D modelling software I'm using, Crocotile3D, doesn't have proper support for animations. It has rigging, and you can do animations (including UV animations) but they don't import into Godot well. I have options of what to do. From using different software like Blender, to making the game without animations, but for now I've put that part of the project on hold until I figure out what to do.
Sound is another problem. I don't know much about sound production and horror style games rely heavily on sound. There are sound libraries ranging from free stuff to paid, but I'll likely still need to edit them.
Finally, I've been considering making a game for "old" hardware. There's been something of an explosion in Megadrive homebrew recently, supposedly due to the release of some good tools. Another interesting bit of hardware is the Commodore 64-like computer Commander x16. I can detail my thinking in another post if people want that, but in short the technical limitations could make for an interesting side project.
