#build2

7dfps jam entry's dev diary 0x0, braindump for a non-violent retro toy

Raw brainstorming about making my very own first person game jam entry. (Two-to-four itch games were 2D cool pieces to learn and will continue some with Mosi before actually making more diverse entries engine-wise)

DAY 0x1:

Keywords

Moodboard

Mindmaps

Study some games and make a research document (Table of credits, specifications and all things documentation)

Imagination cardboard tests and writing prompts on paper "thesis"

Tools, game engine & other technological choices and narrow it down to MVP vague specifications

DAY 0x2:

Choose and gather free public domain assets (especially audio & misc multimedia boilerplates)

Engage with 7dfps dev community

Start thinking about how go with the competition, the "requests" and accessibility in mind

Prototype gameplay loops

Playtest by myself and fix issues as they arise

DAY 0x2

Sketch map layouts

Sketch game assets

Summarize engine-related systems

Implement at broader scales

DAY 0x3:

Tinker around with initial game assets

Craft the feature core of my tiny-packed systemic design

Learn the relevant documentation for the project's engine

Take advantage of engine features

Get started with alpha playtesting it to other people and gather the feedback

DAY 0x4:

Beta players' responding and tweaking from feedback

May expand with swappable assets, additional gameplay systems and level scriptables

Open up the infrastructure for modifications (FLOSS repository, website page entry, seek peer-review for technical documentation and all things making it more community-friendly)

DAY 0x5+0x6

Fixing last bugs

Quality of life

Polish

Creative frontend assets

Writing down-to-heart descriptions and tags

Publish

Curate

Promote

Pitch it to my family

Gather reviews data

Respond to comments & reviews

NOTE

Also yes, I thank each one of you so much for sticking by with my 30k+32 posts (99% are reblogs apparently, welp), 310 following comrades and a handful of awesome conversations since I registered back around July 2015. It really make me blush and it motivates my humble brain as to keep going.

Charred wood kitchen makeover.

Our new kitchen makeover was looking pretty sweet now but the worktop was seriously letting it down. We got thinking about ways to spruce it up a bit. At first, we were tempted by an easy route of buying a wood-effect work top from a hardware shop. We soon realised how expensive they were and how ridiculous it would be in our eyes, using so much reclaimed wood to then just plonk a big old Wickes worktop on it. We wanted something a little more rustic, so we headed down to a builders yard to see what we could grab for free or cheap. Half an hour of head scratching later we ended up leaving with an old scaffolding plank and a pot of danish oil. We cut it into three sections, each the length of the worktop, and I got creative with the jigsaw on the edge piece, trying to imitate the solid wood log worktops we’d admired for so long with their naturally curvy shape. Lucy had remembered a really neat technique of charring wood she’d seen, otherwise known as Shou Sugi Ban. After a quick YouTube lesson in said technique, I whipped out the blowtorch and got stuck straight in, having no idea what the end result would look like. Holding the blowtorch around 5cm from the wood, I slowly charred the cut-down planks, before applying several layers of Danish oil. Charring the wood allows the resin inside to come to the surface and creates a fire- and water- proof coat, as well as bringing out the natural wood grain. Along the front and side edges, I charred the wood more intensely to create a faux-bark effect. All in all it took around 3 hours to finish and install in the van, using sikaflex and screws. The danish oil was applied in 6 hour intervals, and a coat of beeswax and olive oil also helped to seal the wood.

We finally have our dream kitchen in our tiny home, something rustic and homely and totally unique.

Now we’re cooking with fire!

The thing we missed cooking the most while living in our van is pizza. After a long stint of relying on little camping gas canisters, and an even longer stint of having no gas at all, we’ve finally converted our kitchen to run off mains gas. This means that not only can we have a two ring burner, we can also have an oven, and all the pizza we want!

The oven is a Flavel Vanessa, commonly used on narrowboats and in some motorhomes, which, as some of you may remember from our older blog post, we picked up from Wales on the way back from our first Eurotrip. The gas cooker is a double ring CampingGaz one we picked up for £30 from a local hardware shop.

What we wanted though was something a bit specialist, as we didn’t want a fixed cooker on the worktop using up valuable space, but rather something we could detach and store away when not needed. So we came up with the idea of using a bayonet fitting, a 1/2″ gas fitting and hose that can be securely attached then detached when necessary. We attached this to the side of the kitchen unit, and plumbed all the relevant hoses and fittings into the oven and the cooker, first using copper pipe which turned out to be weak and unable to stand the constant movement of the van, then swapping to rubber hose.

Rather than opting for one big gas bottle, we bought two secondhand 4,5kg butane bottles, with a regulator, for £10 from Gumtree (again, we cannot rate Gumtree enough for projects like this), which would store neatly in the cupboard underneath the oven. It was also necessary to drill a hole in the floor and install a vent to allow any leaking gas to escape, as well as purchasing a carbon monoxide detector. We hope this amount of gas will last us our entire second trip, but we also have a French gas regulator in case we do need to buy some new bottles.

With the gas installed and burning with no minor explosions, our final kitchen revamp task was to install a couple of drawer runners on the bottom of our fridge to allow it to easily slide in and out of the cupboard and be opened. It’s a small change, but one that has made a significant impact on the ease of use of our kitchen.

The only thing left to do was find a nice park up by the sea, crack open a beer and cook ourselves a delicious meal of spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread. And neither of us ended up shouting or throwing saucepans out of the van (ahem, Ben...).

Making vintage-style fairy light bulbs

Materials used:

3 x light bulb-shaped drinks glasses, £1 each from The Range

2m thin-wired warm LED fairy lights, £2.95 from eBay

Various screws & washers

Total cost:

£5.95

With all our cool white LED lighting now installed in the van we wanted something to add a warm, cosy feel for those long winter nights. I had my heart set on a trio of vintage hanging Edison bulbs, but not only would these have been hugely impractical to run, they would’ve also swung around as we were driving and most likely smashed.

So I had to come up with an alternative solution if I wanted my warm winter fairy lights, and then we spotted these bulb-shaped drinking glasses in The Range. They were lightweight with removable metal lids but also made of a reinforced glass that wouldn’t smash if they fell on the floor (we hope).

Installing them was a little trickier than I thought, and took a bit of tinkering. 

I was going to attach the bulbs to the roof cladding with a screw and a washer using the holes already in them where the straws originally went. This however meant that that hole would be blocked, leaving no entry point for the fairy lights.

To get around this I drilled a 4mm hole in the side of each lid through which I could insert the lights. Once the lids were attached to the roof, I was able to feed the fairy lights through them one by one. Finally I screwed the glass bulbs in place, arranging the LEDs inside in a swirling pattern, and used a strip of velcro to secure the battery box in place.

My Edison bulbs were done! And for only £6 for the lot. Now we have some incredibly bright yet low energy warm lighting above our bed, which makes it super cosy at night.

Van kitchen revamp

Materials used:

3 x Portuguese azulejo tiles from Porto, £5.29 each plus postage from eBay

Tile grout and adhesive

Tile cutter

Total cost:

£22.84

During our two months spent travelling around Portugal we couldn’t help but admire the ornately tiled buildings everywhere we went. So we wanted to bring a little bit of Portugal with us on our next trip.

We bought these beautifully ornate azulejo tiles from a man in Portugal on eBay. It seemed like a lot of money for three tiles but this was about the going rate when we were in Portugal for secondhand ones. Sometimes it’s okay to splash out a little.

If you’re a fully grown adult who has lived in a house then odds are you’ll know how to tile a wall. But if you’re young van dwellers like us then hopefully this guide will be of use to you as we didn’t have a clue what to do when we started! 

Firstly we needed to cut some plain white tiles to fill in the gaps between and underneath the azulejo ones. Luckily we already had a tile cutter available, but you can pick one up for about £10-20. These work by scratching the glass surface of the tile in a straight line and then applying slight pressure to crack the ceramic underneath. It might take a few tries to get a straight edge, so have a few spare tiles handy.

Once we’d stripped all the old adhesive plastic tiles, the hard part was cutting a circular hole around the base of the tap. We cut one tile in half, dry fitted it in place to get a rough position of the tap, and traced the circle onto the new tiles using the shape from the old ones. Then we used a handheld diamond cutter to scratch approximately the right shape onto the surface of the tile, then carefully “munched” the circle away with a thick pair of pliers. The scratches on the surface prevented the ceramic from crumbling away any further than the shape, although it could easily be done with a little more pressure.

Then it was just a case of grouting, pressing and squishing the tiles in place, and holding them up with some tape while they dried.

Our kitchen looks so much neater now, with the blue & white tiles inside complementing the blue & white on the outside of the van!

Making a lightswitch for under £2

Materials used:

4 x 12V light switches from eBay

One scrap of wood (we used oak)

Total cost: 

£1.98

Our original idea for this light switch was to use a piece of driftwood, but unfortunately driftwood isn’t quite strong enough to drill through, so we used a scrap of reclaimed oak instead.

We marked and drilled out four holes that the switches could sit snugly inside. We also used a belt sander to round off the edges of the switch panel slightly to give it a nice finish. Then we simply popped the switches in, no glue necessary.

The next step was to remove the two pieces of cladding where the switch would be positioned on the wall, trace around the back of the switch panel and cut out an appropriately sized hole that the switches could sit in without their metal prongs touching any of the metal of the van.

We screwed the cladding back up, connected the wires we’d fed around the van from the batteries to the switches, then screwed the panel on. We held our breath, pressed the switch, and luckily nothing exploded. In fact, we had brilliant white lighting illuminating the whole inside of the van! No more sitting in the dark reading at night or getting frustrated trying to chop onions in the dark (ahem, Ben...).

The night our solar panel blew off...

Our first night back in Cornwall!

It’s always a bag of mixed emotions when we re-enter the Duchy. Excited to see our friends, family and familiar faces, looking forward to sleeping by our favourite isolated beaches and beauty spots and then there’s a slight twang of sadness that, for now at least, our journey has come to an end.

After a short drive from Dartmoor where we’d stayed the night before, a lovely reuniting of family and a quick spot of food, I eagerly headed to my favourite sleeping spot. A place that I am so lucky to have found just a few moments from my place of work. I’d been looking forward to reunifying the van and this spot for the past week or so and finally I was on the way there.

An hour or so after arriving Lucy called to say that her car had broken down in the driveway as she was leaving to join me and that she’d have to stay at her dad’s that night. In all honesty after 8 months on the road together, I quite liked the prospect of a night where I could stretch out a bit and have more than a third of the bed.

It was around 4:30am when I woke that morning. I don’t particularly like early mornings but if it’s to watch the sunrise or something nice I might just be inclined to partake. This morning however, was neither a sunset nor anything nice at all.

The wind had picked up considerably since falling asleep and the van was rocking violently. I should at this point mention my favourite spot was around 5 metres from a very steep cliff edge overlooking a small beach village. We’d witnessed some pretty intense storms in Europe but I’d never felt anything quite this powerful. The van was rocking side to side and front to back, thrusting me around viciously as though I were a blade of grass. I’d never felt so vulnerable in the van, in fact this was probably the only time I’d felt like something really wasn’t right.

Just moments later I began to hear an awful ripping sound on the roof. I hadn’t heard it before and over the course of our travels our senses had become quite akin to everything around us and what noises they create. A few seconds later I correctly guessed that that it was the solar panel. Two strong gusts later there was a final rip and then silence. I immediately assumed the worst and that the solar panel had gone. I got out of bed, donning nothing but a headache and opened the side door to see the panel hanging off the side of the van, held up only by two cables. I slammed the door shut and jumped in to the driver’s seat and drove to find shelter. For a few miles I was driving devastatingly naked, the solar panel lifting with every gust and crashing down violently against the fibreglass roof.  I stayed awake until it was light to see what damage had been done. Luckily there was only a hairline crack in the roof and no damage to the panel. Running on empty, Lucy came to my rescue a few hours later with some rope to tie the solar panel to the back doors.

Later that day we set about reattaching the solar panel, pop riveting and sikaflexing the bugger down so securely that the only way the panel will come off again is if the wind takes the entire roof with it.

Whilst we were up on the roof, we decided to remove our leaking roof fan, a fairly pointless feature that is common among LDVs. Once removed, we fitted a blue sheet of Perspex and sikaflexed it in place. This will eventually make a really cool circular skylight inside.

So, in a nutshell, our first night and full day back in Kernow were not quite what we expected but everything turned out okay in the end. After travelling 16,000 miles all over Europe to come back to such a forceful storm must have been Kernow’s way of telling us off for leaving its beautiful yet brutal landscape.

Replacing our broken window (at last!)

As some of you may know, our side window was smashed when we got broken into back in December, and, being an LDV, absolutely no one could get a replacement window for us out on the continent. So we returned with a bodged sheet of aluminium held in with screws and covered with plexiglass and a terrible draft. But today the plexiglass was no more.

We picked up a secondhand window from the scrapyard for £25 (although it was more like an LDV graveyard the amount of sad looking vans that were sitting there rotting away).

Removing the window was a fairly easy process, which involved simply drilling out the pop rivets and punching them through. After just 15 minutes the window popped out.

We fitted the new one in, drilled some new holes for the pop rivets as most of the old ones didn’t match up, then went around it with a rivet gun. Job done! If only we’d known it was this simple. At this point neither of us can resist touching the window whenever we climb into the van, amazed to finally have some glass back in it again!