game dev as therapy
context: got fired, on shady but, in the end, good terms. Had lots of time and huge amounts of you know, the dread of finding a job
You know what I could make in the lots of free time I have? Make my childhood dreams come true, use the knowledge I've acquired and trained for a lifetime, and try something new.
Turns out, in 2 weeks, I went from "what the fuck is Godot and how the fuck do I use it" to "hey I am translating an asset from GDScript (a language I did not know) to C# (better the devil you know)!"
I have:
- The basics of collision.
- Basic movement with a third person camera following the player.
- A camera with PSX shading (it's on the Asset Store, forgot the name but you can find it as that).
- An almost complete translation of ThirdPersonCamera from the Asset store from GDScript to C#. Some skill issues have to be ironed out, specially with the way C# is implemented in Godot and how it's basically going from Spanish to Chilean Spanish. They're interoperable but in ways completely incomprehensible at times.
- A scene manager that, with a custom Node (aka, objects!) handles transitions and moving the player through scenes. Long story short, Godot separates a game in scenes, and they're made, on purpose, to be as isolated between them as possible. I did a stupid singleton that breaks this a bit and handles the common "global" variables. Gets the static data out, removes the scene, loads a new scene, puts it back in.
- My favourite pastime: abstracting the shit outta things to make them as easy to code for. Right now I am basically fucking around and finding out how much I can get away with dark .NET shit while also not being beat down by the Godot API. Worst case I can always talk directly to the C++ backend and hate myself even more.
- Managed to find a compromise between me hating/having severe skill issues with the absolute atrocity of the Blender UI/UX; while using the tools I've used for way too long. That's how I built the walls, and the doggo: SketchUp, and drawing a sprite in Photoshop at 64x128 and scaling. The PSX didn't have support for sprites, they were just flat polygons with a texture. This is the same.
This in two weeks. And what am I gonna do with this?