gnumaru

Well. At least it has been less than one year since the last post🤣.

I haven't stopped development on Ezra's Legacy. It just so happen that:

Social media interaction is so tiring to me that I just stopped interacting ☹️

I develop games as a hobby. I have a full time job as a web developer and wife and kids to take care of, so not only my total amount of free time is little but my available free time per day and week fluctuates a lot. Some weekends I don't have any free time available while some weekdays I have much. It varies a lot.

This difficulty with free time fluctuation was what made me give up on live streams back them in the first place.

But fret not! The project is ongoing.

At the beginning of this year I was expecting to launch it on early access before the end of this year (2024). But as of now (june) I'm not sure if I'll make it on time. But even if I don't make it on time I expect that, at least for the early access launch, It will not take more than another year.

As a side note, In my last post (december eleventh 2023) I haven't mentioned at all about the trailer I had already made back then: So you just put it up here:

I've published an addon that let's you import several file types like xlsx, sqlite, yaml, xml and many others:

If you have ever wanted to import some of these, give it a try!

You can see the readme on github for a full list of supported file extensions

It seems I'm only posting once a year now? that got to change somehow 😂

It's been a lot of time since my last tumblr update, isn't?

I've gone through an increasing shortage of free time since the beggining of 2021, up to the point where I stopped with livestreams at the end of march 2021 and with written devlogs at the end of june 2021. I brieffly stopped with the project at the end of july 2021 for five months where I worked only on ideas for a new codebase and then in december 2021 I started the project from scratch using the same assets and designs but with a new codebase.

This codebase is the third iteration of the project: the first was a unity project, the second was the first godot implementation, the third is this new codebase (again with godot) wich was used on the steam, itch and google play demos, and the current (fourth) wich started by the middle of september 2022 is the port from godot 3 to 4 wich broke several things and demanded several changes.

I never really stopped with the project, even that 5 month pause was in order to rethink my architectural choices and build a better codebase. But the free time shortage mentioned before never ended until now. Stopping updating all my social media was a necessary step to save whatever free time I could get. I have some hope of returning to normality in no more than one year, but unfortunately I can guarantee nothing.

Currently I'm working in another stage with fire/lava theming, wich is currently the fourth stage. This has already apeared briefly in some youtube videos so go there check it out. I started this before the godot 4 migration, so the videos may be a bit old already but I hope that I'll be able to at least come back to post screenshotsaturday videos on twitter soon =)

On 06/21 I continued trying to make the marketing assets for the steam page. I could devote more time than the previous days but the result was not promising. I just have to admit my current limitations as an artist and return to actually work in the game, and that's what I plan to the next day forward. I'm already able to make simple and barely usable pixel art assets for the game itself, but I'm still very bad at making elaborate, free drawn (non tile based) scenarios and, more important, human figures and portraits.

On 06/14 I did not work in the game. I spent all my free time on a side project I had been thinking about for some time. It is not a game-related project (but it could be). I'm creating a lisp-to-C transpiler.

Lisp and C are Two Things I'm really fond of although I never had the opportunity of using them for anything. The idea of a language whose syntax is also the same used to declare its data structures is just too interesting to ignore.

On the other hand, I really think that besides C there's nothing else we need for low-level languages. Other languages come up with systems and runtimes that may be unnecessary in some scenarios. Besides, most language features and constructs just make the programmer's life easier but do not create anything new, that can't be just handwritten in C.

On 06/13 I spent some time creating mockup assets for the game page on steam. There are several things I need to do before publishing the page. Some forms that need to be filled, some media that needs to be uploaded. And before really creating those art assets I wanted to just fill all of them with mockups because later on it is easier to just replace the mockups with the real images. In total I had to make 16 images in several different resolutions and one video file. Aside from that I had to also fill some forms with information, like for example the game rating, the tags, the description, the hardware requirements etc.

If you want to see a screenshot of the beta page, here it is. Just beware that everything are still mockup assets and text:

Today was a pretty unproductive day. I spent most time setting up a dual boot scheme (windows 10 + ubuntu 21.04) on my desktop. I didn't mention it but yesterday when I woke up my windows just booted up to a black screen and never got out of it. Fortunately I'm already used to store everything on external hard drives, so I can always, without a blink, do full hard drive format and make a fresh install. But I was just getting frustrated with windows lately so I was thinking of moving back to linux. I say move "back" because I used linux almost exclusively from 2005 to 2017, only came back to use windows around 2017 because at the time I was starting to do things on unity 3D and running it not natively, be through wine or a virtual machine, was just a bad experience.

So yesterday I spent a lot of time setting up the windows install the way I wanted it, and today I set up the ubuntu install.

Moreover, I'm thinking of not doing the streaming/recording as I used to until now. The thing is that youtube-oriented-development is becoming a bit stressful, specially when you have a lot of interruptions due to external reasons. So I'm thinking of making just the written devlogs and, when applicable, I can post images, gifs, or record small videos of some things I'm doing. I hope with this that I'll be able to return to my usual productivity, the one I used to have before the last development hiatus I had on april and may.

On 06/11 I still was fixing some bugs related to the mummy enemy. Since I only recorded half an hour that was all on 06/11. Out of record, I still took some time to start filling out the steam page for the game. It's been some time since I paid the submission fee but until today I did nothing torwards filling out the game info on steamworks.

So, If you're interested, check out the timelapse:

Also, check out the full video.

On 06/10 I continued implementing the mummy enemy. This time I was mostly fixing some minor bugs that made the enemy not move as expected

So, If you're interested, check out the timelapse:

Also, check out the full video.