Mini Progress The previous devlog was over 4 years ago, with only three yearly status reports since, each of which could be summed up as, “Hey, I’m still here.” A lot has happened, though. Let’s unpack it.
For the past year and a half, I’ve been gradually building what could technically be called an engine for 2D RPG games. It’s still missing a lot of core features, and while I’m not happy with my productivity (over-engineering anyone?
Oh wow, did another year already went by? Things did happen this time around though, finally, so let’s talk about that. I promise to keep it short.
In the 2022 report I rambled about multiplayer experience as the next big thing in the Fantasy Sphere universe. That’s still planned, but was overtaken by something smaller and (hopefully) faster.
One of the best ways to get out of a rut and moving is to just start.
Oh no, nothing happened since last update that also said nothing happened. I just want to let you know I’m still here. To not make it the same empty email, as I made last year, let’s talk about what I have been doing this past year.
Freelancing. I have been freelancing. To gather funds for Fantasy Sphere. And to buy food. Less important, but that too.
And whenever I had time, I was working on my own multiplayer games framework.
19 months have passed since the last devlog. Time sure does fly. I’m here to dust off the old websites and mailing lists, and see if it all still works. So, *clears throat*, hi there. Welcome to the exciting new post about what happened (nothing really), what was I doing (a lot!), and what’s gonna happen in the near future (more of the same), and in the far future (exciting stuff).
Since the last devlog there was 0 commits between 2020/04/06 and 2020/05/16, totaling 102 commits. I have worked 40 hours during this period, bringing the total to 331 hours.
Untitled no more! This has been a productive month, despite not really working on the game itself. As I mentioned in the previous devlog, I focused on marketing. I have also recruited two friends to help me out (well, technically I’ve been talking their ears off since I started last year).
Since the last devlog there were 13 commits between 2019/04/09 and 2020/04/04, totaling 102 commits. I have worked 81 hours during this period, bringing the total to 291 hours.
Wow. Devlog for a year of work. Yes. So what happened? Mostly I was busy with other unrelated gamedev stuff. But it is cool stuff, that I will probably implement in this RPG too. I practically didn’t touch the RPG since June 2019 until March 2020.
Since the last devlog there were 33 commits between 2019/03/19 and 2019/04/09, totaling 89 commits. I have worked 68 hours during this period, bringing the total to 210 hours.
As I started adding more things to my test map, I decided to first improve the workflow and prepare for future development. Tiled supports external tilesets – standalone data files that can be re-used between different tilemaps. Phaser currently doesn’t support them though, and in general there’s no reason to include all of tilemap data in the game.
Since the last devlog there were 5 commits between 2019/03/08 and 2019/03/13, totaling 56 commits. I have worked 20 hours during this period, bringing the total to 142 hours. Yes, this devlog is released over a year late.
Playing fetch is fun, but lack of pathfinding turns minor obstacles into insurmountable ones. So I went down the rabbit hole studying how to implement one.
Tiled based games (which this is) often use a simple A* algorithm to search through the tiles.
Since the last devlog there were 17 commits between 2019/02/26 and 2019/03/06, totaling 51 commits. I have worked 39 hours during this period, bringing the total to 122 hours.
Shaders This time I took a bit of a rest and did something I was itching to try for weeks: shaders.
They are programs that handle the actual process of putting pixels on our screens. Most 2D engines abstract them away and there’s mostly no reason to touch the actual shaders.
Since the last devlog there were 13 commits between 2019/02/16 and 2019/02/22, totaling 34 commits. I have worked 35 hours during this period, bringing the total to 83 hours.
This one is entirely about messing with AI, iterating and refactoring the approach.
Initial Approach It started with basic xml Behavior Tree from the last devlog. First thing I did though, was updating Haxe to version 4 Release Candidate, in preparation to using inlined markup.
