coding projects by Ben

A little blog to collect and share my coding sideprojects. Main is @affinity-for-beans

[freerange-binaries]

Simple boid simulation

Hello! over the past weekend I made a very quick flocking simulation in ebitengen. Each little boid follows a few simple rules - defined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids plus an extra rule of my own to flee from the mouse cursor. Longer blog/discussion under the cut

I'm still trying to dip my toes into the gamedev world (most of my experience is in web technologies) and this was a fun little afternoon project to get to know things a bit better. I chose ebitengine for a couple reasons: first, I feel a little more comfortable with the code-only or code-first engines/frameworks coming from a non-gamedev coding background, and second, I've really been liking Go/Golang from what I've tried so far. A fun, but perhaps overboard, fact about this little demo is each boid calculates its next move in a go function, so the 'game' is multi-threaded. Also on my list of frameworks to try is monogame since C# is the language I've worked with the most professionally and it has a good reputation. I still have some hang-ups about tying myself to a Microsoft product, though - every time I look at the naming conventions of different versions of .NET I want to rethink my career choices, for example.

I'm not sure how far I'll take this idea, but I did have a loose plan to expand this little simulation into a prototype for a sheep herding game. However, spending more time thinking about what it would take to bring this into a full game makes me a little hesitant to fully commit to using a tool like ebitengine. Essentially, once I need a level editor I'm a bit worried if it would be a better use of time in the long run to just use a full fledged engine like Godot. Still, other big projects have gotten by on tools without built-in level editors in the past, so maybe its not as big of a downside as I think.

That's it for this first update post! I'm hoping to post little summaries like this of my future hobby projects, as well as maybe some older things I've done. If you've read this far, thanks a ton! If you're curious about how I made this feel free to ask away