What's been going on?
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**Currently not working**
-A quick who am I
Hi! i'm Twig, or Twivg on most social media.
-What's been going on?
For the last few months since my last blog post - accessible in the archive, I have been experimenting on and off with projects, some of them game dev, some not.
After the new year I had restarted a project I dreamed of over a year ago. The basic pitch was The Grand Budapest Hotel but with cats. The gameplay loop was running around the hotel doing small jobs for other cats. I was working on the project with two friends but due to my poor management skills it fell apart not soon after we restarted. That project did teach me on how I think about game development, through out the project I never thought that I was making this for myself - the scope was also way to big for our first project. I still often think about that game and wonder where we would be if I didn't make a mess of it. That game was under the code name "Feline suite", pretty obivous what it was about lol
**From presentaion pitch**
After that project I took a long break from game development and let my self focus on life and school stuff. Then in end of may early June I started a project that would allow me to just play around with unity and effects. I never planed to ship it in the end and just wanted to have fun. That project was the one I would post about on twitter, Twivg_. I never had a solid idea of what this was going to be. There was always 1-2 ideas that I would think about during downtime but I didn't like. I was working on this on and off during the summer, and was just getting back into it before the unity shit, that kind of sent me into where I am now.
**From my twitter**
After the unity stuff, I was lost. My main two options for making games were Godot and Unreal. I had played with both in the past, Unreal was appealing due to their blueprint programming, BUT they had fees like unity - which side note, I don't think enough people know about. Godot seemed like it would be the best, personally I love the fact that it was open source, allowing for anyone to modify the source code and fix bugs HOURS within them being found, suck it unity! The programming language also seemed very appealing, similar to python, which I had been learning in my computer science classes. Godot never really clicked with me, my unity habits were hard to kill, I'm not really sure why I never felt I had a flow in Godot.
After another small break, and a lot of CS2 wingman. I took another swing and making a game, or I guess the better thing to say would be, making an engine! There are a few reasons behind why I want to do this, the main ones being all my favourite indie games were made using custom tools and frameworks, and since day one I've always wanted to be like them. Also Randy on Youtube, he would post devlogs of him making games in his own engine, they were really inspiring.
Currently with the engine I have physics, player movement, and sprite rendering. I have yet to implement some proper tools that will aid me. The selection process for how I will make the engine is not very interesting. First I thought it would be cool to make everything from scratch, my own render, input system all that good shit. but when I got into some windows API programming I said "fuck that". Next I tried out Monogame/XNA, this framework was used to make Stardew valley and Star fetchers, along with many others, this one was very cool, I enjoyed the workflow very much. While figuring out physics in Monogame, for fun I tested LOVE2D, a lua based graphics framework, which also clicked for me, the workflow was very cool. I soon ported my work done in monogame over to Love and that brings us to today!
**in engine**
Oh and finally, I would like to announce the name of the engine. Fern!