So I decided to buy a new graphics tablet to replace my barely used and very cheap trust tablet with battery powered pen.
I must admit for £100 quid this tablet is nice, big and amply sensitive. I am not professional artist and I did wonder if I’d get my monies worth but all those concerns quickly evaporated when I began using it.
Little bit of Preston practice with new tablet
Quickly using raster persona in Affinity Designer to sketch out the cartoon character, then vector persona to create lines and shapes, I was able to produce the above picture in a few hours.
Another great thing about a decent graphics tablet is I’m able to write up notes on my PC rather than on paper. This help me reduce replication of information say when I taking free flowing notes and then adding them to an agile production web app.
Notes created in SketchBook (free from autodesk) and placed directly in to GDD in hacknplan
So even as a novice artist, I definetly think the tablet was a good move and a real bargain when considered against similar wacom tablets at 3 times the cost. If you thinking of getting a tablet I recommend you just paying a little more and plumbing for huion Q11 v2.
Well as with all things in life, your best laid plans don’t always pan out. I had hoped to have a regular 15 hours a week to work on various projects but that allocation was tenuis at best.
With family demands and personal experiences the time left in an evening was quickly diminished, and soon any free time was eaten up by kids or playing games as means to unwind. So a few months of time lost ( optimistically about 180 hours) I’m back and I need a more pragmatic approach.
Firstly, the extend time from development has lead to rapid decline in my skills. I have gotten rusty with programming, forgetting the little in’s and outs of Godot and having to hit API more frequently. Familiarity with Affinity Designer gone too, I have to use it more often to start firing those old neurons and relearn old tricks.
The take away from all this is even a moderate break of a few months has a time and knowledge cost when returning. So I still like to manage 15 hours a week goal, but what more important is that I regular engage in game development skills just to keep them warm. It’s better that I sketch for an hour, write a short script and follow a blender tutorial for a total of 4 hours one week than nothing at all.
I will have more time, children are starting to grow up and attend full time school in a few years. This could give me 36-40 hours a week it would be a shame to have to spend some of that covering old ground.
It has been a very busy few weeks and so my time has been limited. I unfortunately lost a distant family member, and then recently a closer colleague and friend my supervisor for 7 years Professor R. L. Johnston, I wish his family well during this terrible time of grief.
I also managed a short break in wales with the kids, as well as other various holiday activities. But all of this has left little time to actually do some game development. Which in all honestly is to be expected, 15 hours a week in my current situation is very optimistic and even then highly unlikely that every last minute of that time would be productive.
Firstly I set about making a list of task/features I thought was needed. This wasn’t an exhaustive list nor was it of great detail but enough to get started but more importantly help with productivity. I used a kanban board in a free to use as hobbyist web app called hacknplan its a nice Agile tool set developed specifically for game builders.
The list Consisted of things like:
Get Prototype Art for game ( I used kenny.nl sets )
Setup project
Implement a Base Level
Implement command ball
Implement command paddle
Implement keyboard Movement
etc..
Kanban board for this sprint
They weren’t explicit nor was the list complete, I’d would return to it cross off or adding more detail through out. I decided to set as my initial goal, my 0.1 Alpha I suppose of a basic implementation of breakout, from that I built the list.
The power this brought me was the ability to pickup and put down the project. I typically would just work from my head and either get lost, or distracted and when you reach the more banal aspects of the game such as gui work would be demotivating. Having the list really help keep you on track, just remember its not an immutable slab of commandments, it just a way to keep track and free some of your mental load.
At times however, I did get carried away I added a global EventBus to manage signals that connected deeply within a scene tree. But it was just overkill, a global list of signals would suffice and added benefit of auto completion of each signal from the editor.
I also tried to adhere to SRP principle by placing scripts for various game objects in different nodes of the object. This allowed me to do things like disable motion of the ball, by simply toggling the _physic_process of the node.
And also delegate aspect of the game scene to other nodes as such.
I would like to write more about using the Godot scene tree to aid in SRP to reduce the amount of game code in a single node.
Well, I move on to 0.2, which probably be adding more variation of blocks, and bonuses. Hopefully, I can write another post a bit sooner.
It’s been a while since I have had chance to work on any project, and with the demands of two toddlers, it going to be hard for me to do anything really interesting. With that in mind, I have decided to recreate some of my favourite 2D games as a means to keep my skills fresh and educate myself better with my too lset.
So for my first project I decided to make a clone of Arkanoid a game made by Tatio in 1986. The game extend Atari’s Breakout by adding power-ups, more varied levels and boss fights.
So hopefully with 10-15 hours with agreed “protected” time a week I hope to recreate the core mechanics of the game and then later add to or expand upon them. I also blog about some of my design choices and issues in the off chance someone might find it useful
