PineFog Dev Blog

Three months of full time game dev complete.  At this point, some indie developers might have a game to show.  Not I! Month 1: Draw something to the screen.  Slip & stumble over Rust Month 2: Draw a bit more.  Light things up.  Simple asset pipeline Month 3: Multithreading, networking, databases and architecture.  Rust is 50% less scary Most of the technical pieces I needed to confront are understood.  Nothing compels me away from continuing to pursue this game.  Rust is not as mature as I'd like, at least community libraries.  Documentation is sub-par and my overall development speed is still 20% that of C#/Typescript.  Realistically speaking, the best I could hope for was being at a place where things are moving forward.  I'm happy with where things reside. Architecture is becoming more important to figure out.  In Rust, it's common to have multiple "crates" - aka projects, in separate folders within a single github repo.  They call it a workspace.  Not exac

Tomorrow  (Monday 01/03/2022)  is the first day of an exciting and no-doubt perilous journey.  It represents the first tangible and public step towards a dream.  All those crazy side-projects started/abandoned over the years will finally see justice! Reality is beginning to take hold, thinking about this coming week without an office or team to plug into.  My final paycheck has been deposited, xmas break playing games with friends is coming to a close and the dry-goods in my pantry are smugly aware of my lack of restaurant budget.   What seems natural to me is to go heads-down on research and technical system proof-of-concepts.  What better way to begin reducing risk?  Well, apparently building a game means building a business so to be mindful of other responsibilities, I think I'll mix it up.  EOY books need to be closed, daily routine activities should be evaluated and marketing/social-media research must be achingly pursued.   I've signed up for a storytelling/filmography cl

  Orderly Duck My ducks are beginning to establish row formation.   Business bank account is approved Website has a non-default favicon Website code lives in github and has deployment automation using hooks! Blog has a link to website.  Website should probably have a link to blog... Tax guy assured me the LLC is above board.  No immediate filings needed Beyond the necessary ducks, I've played with shaders using the Godot game engine.   Godot shader drawing tiles I've never written a shader before but my game will have tiles.  Tiles at scale can be expensive.  The dude that developed rimworld had a nice approach; Don't bother with built-in game objects and just draw stuff yourself.  This frees you from relying on all the game engine bloat and opinionated implementation.  I'm not married to Godot at all.  It can run C# using mono, similar to Unity and it's free.  Pure HTML5 seems attractive though getting the Web RTC protocol (AKA. UDP) to run over Steam relay servers

This is blog numero uno for me.  A new challenger appears; theming.  I foresee XHTML knowledge gains in the future.  For posterity's sake, this is the current hairball

Obligatory hello world