just a smol gamedevlog

[onesinglebucketoffrogs]

"Yoooooouuuu shouuld maaaaake aaaa pooooost 'boouuuut thaaat" the shadowy figure speaks from the dark corner. It shuffles menacingly, bending like a slinky, examining the screen. "It doooees nooot maaatter the stuuufff yoooouuuu maade is not visuuuaal. The keeeyyyy to persistannnce is tooooo beeee prouuuud of whaaat youuu make. Pooost stuuuff lil' froooog."

It is true, the two braincells inside the frog spark. After all, i added a whole resource packaging system, a new, comfortable front end interface, and numerous project refactoring and improvements. Better write something on it so i can do something else and stop being stuck in limbo ! Thank you, eldritch ghoul that haunts the cellar !

"Goood wooork, liiitle thiiing. Noooow, whaaaat abooout yooouuuur maaaiiin prooojeeect ?" the thing spills. "Betteeer wooork ooon it ?"

The little frog freezes. Only its minuscule, moist hand moves slowly to the gigantic Mk XIX Desert Eagle .44 Magnum right next to the keyboard. The creature has overstayed its welcome.

[onesinglebucketoffrogs]

The Correct Project Focus Brigade tears the door down. "Drop the keyboard ! You've been found to work on your Side Project instead of your Main One!!! Drop it!!!!" one screams. They rush inside the room lit by a lone 1440p monitor. The diminutive frog, illuminated by the light mode code editor, doesn't react. It reaches down, up from a comically tall and instable stack of chili-flavored bags of chips set on the desktop chair, and presses another key. The heavily armed officers are just too late.

Already the codebase has been cleaned. New and better abstractions implemented. Textures ? Loaded. Instancing ? Streamlined. Shaders ? Enshittified. Documentation ? Somewhat written.

One of the men, voice muffled by his balistic mask, asks: "Wait, where are the shadows ? Geometry shader ? Whattabout screen space stuff ? And sending additional textures to shaders ? Also, is the library even actually usable ? ". The frog emits a terrible sound, akin to the rasp agony of a small mammal encountering a 12 wheeler truck on the roadside. Immediately, the amphibian collapses in on itself. The poor brigade is left all alone. They split the chips.

[onesinglebucketoffrogs]

The little creature in my head that dictates me ideas is asleep, so I went on a sidequest. I got back to an old obsession and designed a library that renders stuff in 3D with opengl and sdl, and it is now done (not complete but done ;-;)

It can somewhat load obj files, manage shaders, basic materials, and instancing. I have so much more ideas... gotta get back to other projects to get them done© too !

So it was an old old craving from me to just use opengl to make a basic 3D engine. I am so proud I got it out in 2 weeks I had so much fun going back to C (my beloved)

[onesinglebucketoffrogs]

Second iteration ! Kept messing up the task planning and i just didn't advance as much as i would have loved to.

There is still one version that is made entirely out of UI ahead, and then I will be able to start the actual gameplay implementation. I yearn for this stage but i need that sweet menu framework to get it off my mind…

On to the player base's menu, the Anchorage !

[onesinglebucketoffrogs]

And this blog starts, a personal journal for the iterations of this yet-to-be-named ("project dust" is my codename tho) tactical, story driven space game.

28 days from first planning session / picking up back the backlogged prototype to this little version (out of 20+ ;-;), which consists in a basic space fleet configuration UI.

What I got now is a good first iteration for the look and feel, some ideas of patterns I can use for the rest of the implementation, and a good confidence in the basic data structures…

Honestly the scariest task was making this post in this empty blog in this empty account on to the next version lads&ladettes