chazzwazzler

[chazzwazzler]

Bonus creature: the slumbering beast

(She doesn't like the creature)

The creature

And his devious henchman

(I love my cats so much)

[chazzwazzler]

The creature

And his devious henchman

(I love my cats so much)

[chazzwazzler]

I've been playing through the downpour slugcats and learning the lore of rain world recently and it's been really fun. I love that world and the characters in it so much.

Anyways I drew an iterator that I thought would be cool, he was designed to archive and collect knowledge and memories to uphold the ancients' legacies after they ascend.

He has a slugcat of his own as well, meant to head to collapsed iterator facilities to collect important pearls and give it to him for archival.

[chazzwazzler]

Been working on a convolutional neural network to detect what rune you draw in Runecaster lately. It's been fairly difficult, and while I could probably just use pytorch to do it easier or something, I would rather create it from scratch so I can actually learn a bit more from this project.

Game development isn't my job, so I'm more concerned about having fun making a game and learning as much as I can from it rather quickly outputting a product.

The neural network is coming along kinda well though! I've got it to fairly accurately classify the MNIST dataset, and I'm currently working on making a dataset of runes with my friends for Runecaster. The hardest part of making all this is that it has to be really accurate, even with messy images, because people will likely be using their mouse to draw runes in the game. Since it is a deduction puzzle game, if someone messily draws a rune and it isn't detected, they will think that isn't actually a real rune and will have a lot of trouble on future puzzles that use it. At the same time, it has to not detect a scribble as one of the runes, otherwise people could cheese the game.

[chazzwazzler]

I love Rust but GOD every time I want to do something new in that language I have to wrestle with a library for six hours because apparently no one ever has had the problem you have had before and if someone has, the answer is always "look at the documentation", when the documentation just lists a bunch of random types and functions with zero description of what they are or do, or what even could be causing my magic error in the first place

[chazzwazzler]

I think I'm going to try for a different style of art than I usually do for Runecaster. Normally I do pixel art from a more traditional camera perspective, but I think it would be pretty fun to do a more hand drawn aesthetic from an isometric perspective. It might also give me a more interesting environment to work with for puzzles.

[chazzwazzler]

Hey! Sorry for not posting for a while, life got really busy and then I started college so it got even busier. As a result, I've just been a lurker on tumblr lately.

I've started working on Soladius again. I've been taking some time to clean up what is already there (it's kinda a mess since I started it a while ago and have learned a lot about working on big projects since then), and now I'm going to start work on something like a GDD. The artist and I have come up with a whole lot of ideas for the game so I need to actually compile and refine them into a complete idea of a game, since right now its just a bunch of big mechanics held together by vague notions.

I'll also be working on Runecaster at the same time, but since that is a solo project and I have stuff actually deeply planned and already implemented for Soladius, Soladius will take priority.

Soladius has been an on and off project since I started high school, and since it's beginning the idea has been evolving and expanding (scope creep goes crazy). As a result, its a big collection of conflicting ideas and plans that don't quite fit together any more. I actually have to take some time to plan out the overall progression, story, and mechanics of the game if I ever want it to make any real progress on it.

I'm used to making games that I can kind of figure out as I go along, but the more I make Soladius, the more it looks like that isn't really an option. Obviously some ideas and design will change for the game, but without some kind of plan I don't even know where to begin building and figuring out in a game like this.

I hate making decisions before I can test them, but I would hate to abandon a project I like even more.

[chazzwazzler]

This is the current prototype for the modules menu of Soladius.

Soladius is going to have two kinds of modules, abilities and modifications.

You will only have one ability slot, and the ability modules will allow you to do all kinds of big things, like healing, lasers, etc, and use up some of your soul reserves (this game's mana/ammo) to cast that ability.

You'll have a few modification slots at the beginning of the game, and will be able to aquire more. Modification modules improve upon something, but always apply an equivalent debuff to something else.

Only the ability modules are pure buffs, the modification modules are meant to be a playstyle thing.

You can equip/deequip modules when you are out of the arena. I did this so that it isn't possible to cheese the game by swapping out a bunch of different modules to avoid the drawbacks of each module or get the exact ability you need at the time. Canonically they are floppy disks or something like that, so it takes a while to install the code onto your armor.

I want to do a lot more of this general idea where you swap out various things to more finely tune your playstyle or strategy, and try to find natural synergies. I might have a gun attachment system as well as different gun types you can select into your loadout (max of 4 guns in loadout) before getting into the arena.

[chazzwazzler]

I think unity is cool and all but I have been fighting tooth and nail with unity to get my UI working right. The UI system in unity is just so buggy and annoying and confusing a lot of the time.

I've also been trying to fix some bugs and get some stuff working for controller support on the UI and it just wont work 😭

I wish unity had some of the stuff for UI that godot does, because this would be much easier if it did

[chazzwazzler]

I found out that unity has built in support for a pixel perfect camera, and I added it to Soladius (my current main game project). I think it looks better this way. The main problem is I'll have to set all of the sprite pivots and the positions of everything to align with the pixel grid (so things don't look wonky) so that will take some time.

[chazzwazzler]

One of my friends and I decided to do the trijam (a game jam where you only have 3 hours to make a game) together. We ran out of time before we could finish our game, but this is what we ended up getting done before we ran out of time. I did the sprites and programmed the bats. We made it using bevy, which was pretty difficult because this is the first game I've worked on using bevy.

[chazzwazzler]

I'm working on a physics engine like The Powder Toy right now, and I'm making pretty good progress. I'm making it from scratch with the Rust programming language.

Performance seems really good, with the tile rules processing capping at only about 500-700 microseconds. Because of that, I can definitely afford to fit in a whole lot of advanced behaviors, like buoyancy, more realistic collisions, and stuff like pressure and heat without bring performance down to a crawl.

I want to make a series on youtube of me developing this program and go over how it works and the techniques I used and such. I'm currently working on the intro video but editing it really time consuming and hard so I'm unsure when that will be uploaded (also the narration is so hard to do, why can I only not speak properly when I am recording 😭)

[chazzwazzler]

I'm mostly working on the bomb game right now, but I also wanted to show a game I'm making for one of my friends right now.

It's going to be a puzzle game where you try and figure out how various magic symbols work by testing out runes that are made from some of those symbols. You then will have to reconstruct the runes out of those symbols in the correct order, since each symbol has an additive/modifying kind of effect on all of the symbols drawn on the rune before it.

I was kind of inspired by Chants of Sennaar as well as the owl house's glyph system.

It's a little janky right now, but with a little work it might be kinda cool.

[chazzwazzler]

Made the main menu for my game. I already had the settings menu made with rebinding and all that, but now it is actually accessible.

I thought that it would be cool since a large part of the game is bombs falling from above that the menu would be the same way too. I ended up coding a way to get the spawning system scaling with the UI so that it didn't look so janky (mixing objects and user interface is usually a pretty bad idea) and I think it worked pretty well. I actually have a bit of fun scaling the window to kind of knock the bombs around with the edges of the screen (they collide with the edge of the screen). Perhaps I'll use this accidental behavior in another game where you have to control the size and position of the window to control the game. IDK though, it's just a possible idea

I might use this UI scaling thing on the main scene so that there aren't any black bars on the sides on different aspect ratios, but since it would be a change in the environment it would not work well with P2P multiplayer if I decide to ever add that. I just need to find some way to make screen scaling work a little better or be more visually pleasing.

[chazzwazzler]

Currently working on a PvP sort of game with a destructible environment where bombs are dropping from the sky and you can toss them at other players.

So far from my playtesting with other people, it seems pretty fun. Largely I think it mainly needs more content and just little bits of polish.

This clip is me playing against myself on the same keyboard. I did not realize how bad I was at multitasking with my hands until recording this lol

This is pretty much my first full game made in godot, and I must say, this game engine is GREAT. It was hard to transition to at the start from unity just because things operate a little differently, but now I don't think I can go back to using unity again. Godot just feels so much more fun to use to me. Idk how to describe it really.

[chazzwazzler]

Just wanted to test out posting and all that so might as well make like a "hello world" sort of post. I don't really know much about tumblr (though if I'll be honest I'm not all that good at understanding any social media), but I decided to create an account on a whim since the community seemed fun. Hello!

PS. idk what kind of things I may be posting or whatever, but I like D&D and I make video games so probably that kind of thing

PPS. the character limit on tumblr is so high, this is amazing I can be as verbose and tangential as I wish