There has been a hiatus on Tomb Tome. It actually looks longer than it was since the last items I was working on had to do with engine internals and do not provide any fancy new images for me to post. The real delay was the last month being consumed by a month-long contract repairing laptops for a local school district. The contract has ended now, just in time for me to start a new job. I got a Level-2 support job at a local office supply company. If the job is legit, then I will be able to get into a good rhythm within a couple of weeks and refocus on my projects (mainly TT) again.
In other news, I am planning a small game jam in December dedicated to learning Godot. I like the involvement of the from-scratch C development, but I am going to try Godot again to see if I can get into a scene where I can produce a game in a year... not ten. Time will tell!

More progress has been done with Tome Tomb. I can now load levels from text files and define some settings, such as theme and accent colors. I am liking how the game has progressed visually and I am looking forward to working on gameplay.

I am making good headway on Tome Tomb and worked through a ton of bugs.
It is now cross-compiling on Linux and Windows, so having Steam Deck support should be trivial.
I upped the texture resolution to 128x128 and it looks SO good!
I also might add more palette colors.
As it stands, changing the color palette does work, but I cannot do it on the fly.
I will either have to completely recreate the texture every time I want to change the palette, or load all of the possible combinations at once.
Considering the textures (event at the larger size) are only ~12kB, loading all of them is probably the way to go.

After a good amount of time full-time RVing, I am in a new home and have my new office. The office is still under construction but at least the most important bits are covered. I have power, internet, a fan, and my laptop setup.
Now to get going on projects again.

There was an update on Legend of Pandora.
-->Check it out on itch.io<--
There is finally a Windows release!

I am messing with a cosine based bounce for the staff/lantern.
I was also able to add an FPS counter to work on performance in the future.

I am now the proud owner of a used Jeep!
With the car search over and now having a mode of transportation, other than motorcycle, I feel a great burden is off my shoulders. I almost immediately became more productive...
that's life I suppose.

Today I drew up a quick lantern for the HUD. (I think I can make the 64x64 texture size work for it.) I also was able to set the transparency so it renders correctly.

This is a good example of life getting in the way of development. I have been getting snowed in and can't leave my driveway. We sold our little Honda and I have been looking for something with all-wheel-drive or 4x4 to solve my problem. On top of that I have been looking for a part-time job. With all that my productivity went to full zero.

I am taking a break from the Godot study to go back to Tome Tomb. The amount of frustration I was running into is too much to bother with until I have some more stability in my life. I went ahead and made a project page for Tome Tomb on itch.io:
Link--> Tome Tomb
I think it looks pretty good and I find that motivating, a good start.

Spent the day getting nvim setup to work with Godot. I used vim-plug to install gdscript support from
https://github.com/calviken/vim-gdscript3
and also added the gruvbox theme.
After years of working in vim to code I couldn't take using the built-in editor any more.
Oh, and I imported the music into the Godot project just to make sure the music player's 'open' and 'play' buttons worked. All was well.

Was able to get an "open" button to work with a "play" button. The main issue is that Godot imports files and converts them to supported formats. This makes it so you cannot just blindly load files from the file system and use them in your app.
Progress was good enough today. Tomorrow I plan on checking out some Godot classes on YouTube and see if they are any better for learning. I feel like I am currently wasting a lot of time fighting this book instead of making progress.
Let's see how it goes.

Another chapter that is out of date. I have gotten through okay and will continue to work on the exercise of making a basic music player tomorrow.

Another disjointed chapter where it was easier to look up online how to do the exercises than it was to read the chapter.
Next week I start hour 9 and will be one-third into the book. I will experience great joy when I finish this thing.

I was able to make good headway today and finish hour 7 in the book. I still find the book very frustrating. This chapter covered getting engine status variables and making tool scripts that you can run on scenes. I really just don't get how the authors thought that scripting tricks really needed to come before basic interesting things such as sound and collision. The last chapter was making a basic game which uses input, and the NEXT CHAPTER is about accepting input...
No one considered that you could make demos that didn't need input until AFTER the chapter about input?
-shakes head-
At this point I am really missing just developing in C.

I finished up the exercises of chapter 5 and begain reading chapter six. I didn't go nuts today since I am happy to start the weekend.
I will continue to push through this book on Monday and I hope the other chapters do not hold me up as much as 5 did. I like the idea of being able to utilize Godot for future projects and jams but more than that I like seeing how other engines organize their inner workings which helps me to create my own engines / frameworks in the future.

So with plenty of rest and a lot of coffee, I was able to get the book's game source working. I am starting to fully realize how the Godot engine uses signals though there still seem to be some odd use cases and better methods to try.
At least now I am able to move on since I was beginning to feel like this would never 'click' with me.

Day three of still trying to find solid examples of how I am supposed to use and organize signals in Godot. I am now just copying and pasting as much code as I can from the examples. I will do my best to understand the project provided on the book's website since just following along in the book is not working.
My hope is to just push past this chapter (or possibly the rest of the book) and learn what I can. It seems I will learn most of Godot through web searches, video tutorials, and trial and error. It's a shame.

In hour five of this book (Chapters are called hours) it runs you through a complete mini-game.
While I am still completely lost on signals I am still making headway with the other aspects of making the game. There definitely seems to be a disconnect in what the book wants me to do and what I can do with GDscript. I am left with looking up other tutorials to learn what the book has been unable to teach me.
But progress is being made and I was able to complete a majority of today's goals.

I look forward to tomorrow.

After struggling though the last chapter of my Godot book, when I got to the exercise, it made about zero sense to me.
I'm not sure if it is because I am on a different version of Godot or what but it seems to be asking me to do things that don't exist in the menus.
I'm calling it for the week.
Unfortunately not every week can be a shining beacon of inspiration and productivity. I will proceed to the next chapter on Monday.

I got through the parallax scrolling exercise and read through the GDscript chapter. Too tired to complete the exercise for scripting so will do that tomorrow.

So it looks like I completed the final merge for News Scramble. The last fixes were for some Russian mispellings. A bitter-sweet experience but I am glad the project has reached completion.
As for studying I was able to make the tileset in Godot. Tomorrow should be parallax scrolling. :o

Worked a little today on creating a tileset in Godot.

I must say I am not impressed with git's design. It seems apparent to me that graphical git tools exist primarily because people are willing to pay money to use a tool that makes git intuitive. As it stands, every time I have to use git on the command line to do anything other than the most basic push or pull, I have to browse through multiple tabs just to figure it out.
Knowing that there are text-based tools that allow you to browse and customize the Linux kernel I am more than sure that git's user interaction experience could be vastly improved.

The jam is over and my nerves have calmed.
Link--> News Scramble
Since I worked Friday and WAAAY late into Saturday I took Monday off. I'm still exhausted today but was able to check on the game, respond to comments, and do some more artwork to promote it.
All in all I am very glad I pushed myself to join a game jam. My inspiration to learn Godot is VERY high now. Once you have to work blindly with creators you have never met before you see how quickly you are classified into "what can you do?".
Being able to program in C did very little to attract attention and I was only picked up for my pixel art experience (from my game Legend of Pandora). Being able to have Godot under my belt + pixel art + basic audio skills, will definitely make me more desireable to future teams.
So, what now?
There is still work to be done on News Scramble since we all want it to have more polish. After that I will be recentering my focus on Tome Tomb. I would like to see that game to completion. If I CAN learn Godot at the same time I will. Otherwise it will just be one thing at a time for me.
Beyond that I plan on going back to Legend of Pandora and porting it and posting it to my itch.io portfolio.

Today is the last real push to get the art done for the project (News Scramble).
After this I just have to wait for our Godot dev to finish.
Very exciting to be nearing the end of this jam!

I work in the "Pomodoro technique" of 45 minutes on and 15 off. Each cycle of that I call a "push". My goal is always four pushes four days a week.
Today was the first time in awhile I was able to get the full four pushes in. Now that the game jam is wrapping up, the mounting pressure to complete the project is very good motivation.

Just worked on level select art for News Scramble. No studying today. Energy levels are picking up. It's nice to finally feel like I am getting back into the groove of things.

More Godot study today. Using a book is always a bit slow at first but I find it more rewarding in the end. The difficulty with online tutorials is simply the burnout one suffers staring at a screen for too long.

More art for the "News Scramble" game. This time doing faces for a news ratings meter. I did two good submissions today on that project and am continuing my education on Godot.

Today I was able to get the main menu art done. It has been nice getting positive feedback from the team.
The language barrier has still been difficult but we are working past it. Our gitlab page has been put to use and the next prototype is well on its way.

Our progammer has produced a demo for us! It's awesome to see the project come to life!
I did some more work on the color art and have created a gitlab page for the team.
Tonight I will start digging into my "Sams Teach Yourself Godot Engine Game Development" and see if I can't help a little with the programming if the team needs it.

The game jam has been going okay enough. Communucation has been sparse. Maybe a few sentences a day from the members. We did have one programmer quit but I don't see that as too big a deal.
The design is about a news reporter who has no lines being fed to them and is just trying to figure out the story using what they see on the screen. I like the idea. The only real problem I'm running into is using google translate to discuss ideas with the designer is tough. There is certainly a lot lost in translation.
My job as pixel artist has been a nice change of pace. I originally wanted to do a four-color gameboy style look but that was scrapped for a full color disign by the team. Here is the current layout mockup:

Today I signed up for my first game jam!
Link --> My First Game Jam: Winter 2021
While I did make some progress on Tome Tomb my primary focus was signing up, learning what was involved in a game jam, and finding a team.
Exciting!

Still trying to get focused.
Worked a little late into the night to make sure I could load the level paths into an array. From there I should easily be able to load the actual levels when I need them.

Today I learned a new term...
Doom scrolling.

Today was pretty low energy. I could not find the brain-space to create new code. I spent most of my time looking into twitter.com and other ways to socially network. It's a bit intimidating to be sure especially since I rejected Facebook years ago and that was the last real "social networking" I really did. I also boycotted github.com and linkedin.com so I'm not sure how that is going to work.
What little I was able to do on Tome Tomb was remove the maze generation feature since I may not ever implement it as a game mechanic.

I would like to say that I took some time off for the hoildays but my wife and I were just sick with COVID-19. We are on the mend now, thankfully, and I am back in the office reorienting myself.
Today I was able to get the footstep sounds to activate only when the player is actually moving. I also made a mockup level for parsing. It's always a bit tricky to get back into a good work-flow after a break.

SDL2 mixer now working. Grabbed some footstep sounds and made a couple of feet timers. I will change the sounds for sure since they NEED an echo for the ambiance to be right (currently sounds like walking on deep carpet). Music to come later.

Testing movement in all four directions for collision is now working great.

The darkness is now set by distance. Reworked wall texture to test a paint effect. Finally, started getting collision detection working.

Updated the textures a bit more to play with the feel of the game. I also tested a way of adding darkness to textures by drawing a transparent Rect over the ray cast texture. Adjust darkness simply by adjusting the transparency.

The sky and ground colors are now pulled from the custom palette. Will need to make it dynamic, right now it's only red. Updated the bookshelf texture to see how I like the grey bricking and bookshelf itself. This gives only the books custom colors.

A new wall material "BOOKSHELF" has been added and textured. To make it stand out I quickly added in a red palette as well.

The first eight colors in the bitmap index are replaced with a custom color. This will allow me to generate textures of many different color combos but the same pattern. The wall texture is also looking pretty cool.

Two more variables added and working in the engine.cfg. The rest are just busy-work to do as-needed. I started work on a wall texture with a larger palette to test out color palette manipulation with more than two colors.

The first engine variable has been set by reading in and parsing the engine.cfg!
--Current playlist-- Diablo 1 & 2 O.S.T.

The engine can now load an engine.cfg file and store it into an array. Next is parsing the array for setting variables. I have migrated the source into a header for use in all of my future projects since config files are so universally helpful. Looking forward to a weekend with little screen time.

The oh-so-important TODO.txt has been added to the project. This file forces me to imagine all of the features and resources the project requires. Even with a bare-bones game such as a block-pusher one can get side-swiped with all of the little details required to make the game feel complete.
File loading is next.

I have created a new website for my software. I currently am enjoying the old System 7 theme. The log page still needs some polish and I will need to add a page for the projects I am working on. I am hoping to create an old 2-color bitmap image for my about page. It will be fun to figure out how to make one.

Tome Tomb (working title)
I have finished a nice ray-caster demo in C and am looking to make it into a basic game engine. I have a game idea based on those old block mover games. I enjoyed an old DOS one called Fruit. Today I copied the demo to a new git folder in order to begin work.

Legend of Pandora
I still plan on porting this game to Windows and Linux. Right now it only exists for the Open Pandora handheld gaming system. link --> LoP