Progress Update- Back to the brains! (Patreon)

Display code- done! Now, onwards to the brain code!

I have a coding stream starting now! Vods are available too!

To new patrons: We’re in the middle of an absurdly-long update cycle. Here’s the summary and how to access content.

What's being worked on?

So all month, I've been working on this big display code change. Last week we were nearly finished, and hit a big milestone on stream. I've been bugfixing since then, and things are now working and running on the new code. Woo!

Now it's on to some interconnected tasks- brains, debugging tools, and html as ui.

Brains

This was the reason for the display code side quest. Brains link into the display system in a way that requires the level of complexity we have with this new code. So for now, I'll be working on the execution part of the brain interactions:

Cause -> brain recognition -> brain response -> execution

The previous stages of this are already done or partially done, so this'll be the final step to create the actual alive characters.

Big topic, but not much to say yet. I'll talk about this next week!

Debugging tools

So I'm taking this a lot more seriously than I have in the past. Instead of a silly little test game, this has become an actual project that funds my living expenses and I have larger scale goals for. Making proper debugging tools is like buying actual adult power tools- eventually, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't do it.

So I'm gonna be working the brain testing into an in-game debugging panel.

(the framework and basics are already done for it)

The idea is that all existing game objects can be selected, deleted, observed, and manipulated via this panel. It's integral to working on brains, because they're too complex to fumble around without real-time diagnostics and stuff.

I tend to want to just dive head-first into making the thing without spending time on things like this, which I've found only works on small-scope features. On big stuff, it seems like it's always worth it to think meta first: what will the process of building this look like? 

When I moved into my apartment, I used a soup can as a hammer to nail my pictures to the walls. It worked at the time cause my needs weren't big enough to warrant buying actual tools. Since then, my needs have grown and even though the soup can would still work, I bought a fucking hammer. It allows my capabilities to scale up with my needs.

From what I can tell, this is a skill that successful people are good at- stopping and assessing whether their current toolset, skillset, environment, process, etc...  are appropriately scaled for the task they're engaging with. 

I don't need a fully-featured Unity-style game building program. I do need some real debugging tools though.

HTML as UI

The HTML UI is what's being used to construct the HUD and the debugging tools.

I'll dive into this more as we go, but I'm mentioning it cause a long while ago, I said this is a feature that I would wait until initial release before starting work on. It turns out, this is actually a much more scalable approach that coding in-engine UI.

The technical details are too much to go into right now (stream starts in a few minutes oops) but HTML is by far the best tool for the job. Instead of spending hours coding each little button type and meter and stuff, I can just use the already-built tools in HTML to do it. 

It's a little annoying to transmit information to and from the game engine, since the HTML lives outside of it, but it's still a wayyy more solid decision to do things this way. That's all!

What does "done" mean?

This is a big question in my process. 

I've never been in this situation before. I have a big project that's being actively anticipated, but no concrete timeline/due date. Having a good sense of what "done" is could make a difference of months of development time.

I said the display code is done. There's a few more bugs left though, and some changes to adapt to. Certain pieces aren't fully fleshed out yet. My kanban board for the display code refactoring looks like this:

Hitting 100% 'done' is impossible since it starts bleeding into other categories. The "Planned" column kind of fills with semi-related ideas, or things that are less important that can be addressed much later or simply ignored. It's likely I'll just grab a couple of the high priority tasks from there and purge the rest.

There's a real need for ruthlessness when it comes to project management, I'm finding. Otherwise you're just endlessly trapped as the todo list grows faster than it disappears.

Minor cleanup gets folded into new tasks, like the HTML ui stuff, which is its own category. And certain bugs appear that are worth ignoring until I have some of the other debugging tools built, which will instantly make fixing them super easy. 

There's still some display-related stuff to work on, but I'm comfortable saying- the feature is done.

... and that's all for now!

Thank y'all so much for supporting me throughout this. I'm super excited to be working on the brain stuff cause it means I'll get to start showing off the fun parts of the game finally! You peeps are awesome, and so very patient >.>'

<3!!