#not dev stuff

(i don’t have xkit on here anymore so @lostjumper hope this works for tagging)

i technically do have a youtube page, there’s just exactly one game-dev-related video on there, and it’s that demo preview from two weeks ago. there might be more like those in the future but i doubt i’ll be doing much else for videos on game dev stuff (i wouldn’t know where to start to be honest?)

Even in the mall, I couldn’t escape him…

But yeah Lotso was an ICONIC Pixar villain like bro looks so cuddly then the switch flipped fast

okay so it’s been almost two years since the last update but bear with me

quick timeline of what’s been going on:

health issues got worse (and are still worse)

had to put project on pause between that and Life Things

started having time again to work on project and realized there were a lot of overhauls i wanted to make and my scope was honestly bigger than i had the means to handle right now (between free time and just. health)

started reworking a new game design document with a smaller scope to work on instead

and now i might as well pick this blog back up and keep doing on it what i was planning on doing on it, which is to keep track of all my gamedev stuff!

it’s going to mostly be planning things for a little bit until i get back into coding but i already have the start of some assets and a reasonable amount of planning drafted out and now i need to fill it with a bit more lore and explicit logic and it’ll be ready to Look Like Something

i’ll make sure to tag different types of devwork (lore vs mechanics planning vs asset work vs coding, etc) so people can blacklist any of the ones they’re not interested in

i should be able to get back to working on this project/blog during those six weeks, but we’ll see once i get there

not at the moment, no, sorry :(

i’ve been considering whether to make it open-source or not, but i’m leaving the final choice for when i’ve actually got the game finished

what i’m mostly thinking on doing is releasing parts of the engine as open-source sometime after i’ve finished and published the game. i really like the concept of open-source software, but since this is a pretty small personal project i’d feel somewhat uncomfortable having all the code be up for grabs before i’m even done, if that makes sense?

i’ve only set up the environment on ubuntu and windows so far, so i’m not sure how it differs from other options.

on ubuntu it was surprisingly fast, everything pretty much worked out of the box by following their installation guide (added the ppa, downloaded from it, and voilà). at first i just coded in a text editor, but when i started having a few more files i switched over to pycharm, and i didn’t have to do anything special for it to use kivy for running python files.

apparently you can also set pycharm up to recognize kv syntax, but i’ve been coding interfaces almost exclusively in python so i haven’t really looked into that.

i’m not sure how well other ides work with kivy, though, since i haven’t tested any others.

on windows though, it was uh… a little more of a mess to get working, and i spent an entire afternoon trying to figure it out. installing kivy was again pretty easy, if… less practical than on linux, though, since you have to set it up to run .py files manually.

getting pycharm to use the kivy interpreter instead of the python one took a while to figure out though (for those curious: go into settings -> project -> project interpreter, and go select the python.bat file in the folder where you downloaded kivy to. if it complains about invalid output format, ignore it, it still works)

once i got the ide set up and everything though, things went pretty smoothly! kivy comes with several example projects bundled to let you see some of its features, and the online api documentation is pretty well-furnished

having come from pygame, a couple things took me a while to get used to, but once you figure out the general idea of how widgets and layouts and the such work together, things are pretty simple. the kv language also seems pretty interesting, but seeing as i’m a lot more comfortable with straight python, i’ve mainly been using that so i don’t get too frustrated when i can’t figure out how to do what i want

i’ll be honest, i was not expecting to have so many people show up here, much less this fast, so, uh. hi! i hope you enjoy your time here

i went and changed the theme to something a little cleaner (for desktop only, sorry mobile users :c) and added a small description and stuff, since i wasn’t expecting people other than friends (who already know what this project is about) would come here haha

so yeah, this is where i keep my devlog for the game i’m currently working on! it’s been a pet project of mine since late 2009, but this is the first time i’m actually getting somewhere with coding it, and i’m hoping the devlog will help keep me on track

i plan to release both small demos and bits of code as i go. the code bits are meant to help people figure out how some of this stuff can work and play around with it :) coding is cool and i like sharing that haha