After a few months working on other things I'm picking back up my project of writing a small game in zig for the playdate

Defier - Souls-Like Boomer Shooter Devlog-Lite YouTube video by Dark Portal Gamedev

Alright, I've finally sat down and put together a dev video for my souls-like boomer shooter. The art is still very WIP, lots of stuff is being tested, but the gameplay really feels like it's coming together.

You can find it here:
youtu.be/0kVm0IxSw2Y

Messing around with the playdate and found out someone in the zig community made a template for it, so naturally I’m poking around that api and seeing what I can do

sometimes the universe really does reach out and tell you something

Similar vibes lol

This looks awesome!

I finally got my extremely janky animation system working??? Literally everything is a first pass but this entire thing is actually working. World State -> Behavior Tree -> Animation Manager -> Animation Metadata (hitboxes, scripted actions, etc.)

In the jam this week I’m trying as hard as I can to embrace the philosophy of “you can just do things”… and coding up the simplest version of each feature I want, and moving on.

Completely fighting all urges to architect it at all, and letting the code naturally take shape #gamedev

I got derailed for a bit because the matrix implementation had some errors in it... but still going strong making this game in C with no dependencies (except SDL).

This is testing a simple voxel grid with everything set to two (of 16) types

ngl this project is turning me into much more of a C zealot for #gamedev

Did a huge refactor, finally cracked and broke things out of main.c into their own files.

But I now have 3D cubes instanced as “voxels”. Not bad for two days starting with an empty c file.

Starting with main.c and building up is going pretty well. I have a basic skeleton of a framework to prototype a game for the jam, and it runs across macOS/linux/win/wasm

The best part of starting from zero is there's nothing to "look up" I can just make everything I want

I’m doing a game jam where I started with just main.c and buildsh, and it’s very liberating (so far)

We will see how I feel when it comes time to submit 😅

I think it came from people being over zealous about rewriting things in rust from like… 2015-2022.

You couldn’t mention a C/C++ project without 10 people saying it needed a RIIR.

It made a lot of people super grumpy, and we still see the fallout from that 🫠

The most stressful thing about working in software is having everyone panicking about hitting deadlines, while also doing everything under the sun to ensure that your development is as slow as possible.

Programmers are so good at making programming no fun 😪

Hitachi DA-P100 Illustration by Akira Terasawa 寺沢彰

Remember when consumer electronics were sexy?

Two people on a cliff watching the ocean

Surfer turning on a wave

Shoes on the beach

Surfers on the beach at sunset

Surf competition in Santa Cruz on 35mm.

Bring back 45 minute tracks!

If you’re worried about security, just buy an armored car like everyone else does. Mercedes, Audi, bmw, Maserati, Land Rover all make armored cars that look like normal sedans/SUVs. I promise it will work better than this monstrosity.

A tree on the hill in golden light

The coast in Santa Cruz

Carmel beach on a sunny day

Still have a light leak in the Kiev 88, but am really enjoying playing around with film.

I got my first roll of film back from my vintage 120mm camera. It’s got a pretty bad light leak, but I got some shots I’m happy with.

Every time I’m worried that I’m not creative or interesting enough… these people are here to remind me that I’m doing okay.

A Kiev 88 camera with a 200mm lens

Looking into the viewfinder of a medium format camera.

I’m extremely excited to play with 120mm film in this guy this weekend 😎

Getting back into film photography. It’s so tense after using digital for so long 😳

Matt Christman is one of the very best we've got and I'm pulling for him and his family tonight.

a bird holding a lit match while another clutches a cigarette butt in its beak

#mutualaid

Burning Man is a perfect metaphor for the tech bro vision of society, a money extraction machine reliant on the free labor of participants to exist which dissolves into chaos the moment anything goes wrong

The closest I have is being in a Seattle sports bar for Super Bowl XLIX.

That interception killed us all. A complete emotional roller coaster.