Hi everyone! It’s been a minute. I have been increasingly busy with school, but now I’m on summer vacation. So, I’m much more free now. Today’s blog isn’t much of an update unfortunately, I kinda wanted to discuss my current progress on Dead Road, where I’m heading, and concerns and fears. As many probably know, coding is a hefty process, so I just wanted to vent a little bit about it.
Two quick things first: I have a strawpage. If you want to write something to me, go there: https://skeletonzone.straw.page/
Other thing, the image up above is an image testing out the program asperite. Pixel art is very fun, and I’m looking forward to doing more of it. I hope you guys enjoy it as well!
Anyway, back to what I was going to talk about. Even though it's summer vacation, I have made little progress. I have made progress, but almost all of it was code that had to be rewritten because of collision issues. The other day I made myself go through a 3 hour coding session, wrapping up all code that needed rewriting. I ended up feeling defeated when my code was not working as intended. The player collision worked just fine, but enemies were clipping through the walls, yet still recognizing that there was a wall. I searched on so many different websites and videos and found nothing to help. I felt so defeated and stupid that I ended up turning to the GameMaker forums. My head both said that it's okay to ask for help, but also that I was so stupid. Did Toby Fox go on the forums for help? Why should I? I made a post anyway. I think the funniest part is that I ended up figuring it out without the forum.
Coding is tough, especially game code. Before, I was mostly doing object oriented programming, but starting near the end of last semester, I learned event based programming. Event based programming is so cool, but it's also so confusing. There's so many moving parts in order to make an interactable thing on a computer, and I frequently doubt my own ability. Part of me is scared I’ll never know how, and suffer the consequences. Sometimes I think I may have been too ambitious with this game. Maybe I should've made something even easier. But I can’t let these thoughts cloud my judgement. I know what I want, and I will fight for it. It might be hard, but I’m going to keep pushing.
I think now that I have player movement, player and enemy collision, and enemy path finding (with the ability to follow and lose sight of the player), I’m approaching the halfway point of this current “testing” phase of development. I still have to figure out melee combat, items, inventory, UI, etc, but once I get those down, development will go a lot faster. It's an uphill battle, but I will continue onward. I will try my best to make time for it both during summer vacation, and at school, even for just a little bit.
Anyway, that’s kinda all I got for now. If you read this far, thanks. Anyway. I love you guys. More to come. Eventually.