So I’ve always been interested in programming and game programming in particular. I followed LD for so long, but never actually did something. That’s something I really want to change.

For … reasons, I couldn’t do any programming for years, so I’m very much out of practice. Also, due to health reasons, I can’t concentrate for very long. It might seem basic to you, but if I can think about one particular thing for an hour, it’s a win in my book. Basically, the  brain was on vacation for a few years, and I’m trying to get it back into shape.

Actually, as I proofread the last paragraph, fuck it. Just… fuck it, I’ll just say it like it is. I’ve been a pretty good and clever computer science person for all my life, until I somehow became a massive alcoholic. For the last 8 or so years, I’ve been trying to drink myself into an early grave, and boy, was I trying hard. I didn’t succeed however, got sober earlier this year and now I’m at a point where I want to get my brain back. I’m much better in many aspects, but I’m still not able to concentrate for long, I just lose focus quickly and if I do, it’s all over, I can’t get back into it. Also, I just didn’t do any programming for a long time, I want to become my old self again. Having to look up stuff every minute is really getting on my nerves.

So, what to do? My goal is to be in shape for the next LD. So I’ll download Unity (pretty excited about this tool, let’s see how it works), give myself a week and try to work on something for at least 4 hours every day. 4 hours may not seem much to you, but for me and my battered and bruised brain it’s pretty ambitious. Let’s see how it goes. Also, I’ll be documenting my journey here, I’m thinking it might give me some motivation by being accountable for something. I’ve been ashamed enough for two lifetimes, I don’t need to fail again in front of game developers

No ideas yet, but I’ll come up with something while downloading hopefully. It doesn’t have to be great, it just has to be something playable for now. Enough talking, let’s do this.

As expected, it got late. I got home at around 9pm yesterday and I was completely out of food. So the choice was between rushing to the store to cook something or working on the game. So naturally I fired up Unity.

I took a good look at my approach to collision detection and decided it was quickly becoming too “hacky”. For every small problem I tried to avoid, another was popping up. I decided to – again- remove half the code and try something different. Maybe I could avoid collision altogether if I implemented proper pathfinding first? While researching I found the fantastic A* pathfinding project by Aron Granberg, which made a few things much more elegant. I added a Plane behind the 2D scene where I do the pathfinding. The result is a Vector3() array, which awesomely enough is the data structure that iTween uses as a path. So I let the A* algorithm do its thing, call iTween.PutOnPath with the result and let the character move. That will eventually avoid collisions entirely. I say “eventually” because it doesn’t work quite right yet.

In theory, the box around the counter would tell the A* algorithm that the nodes inside it are not walkable, so the pathfinding should navigate around that. It doesn’t. After tinkering with it until about midnight, the nodes just remained walkable, no matter what I did. I don’t know why, I probably made some stupid mistake. However, this was the point where I had to stop, because I got… let’s say annoyed. Okay, let’s not say annoyed, let’s say “ready to punch a baby seal”. But it wasn’t in vain, because in theory I have a very elegant solution, one I really like. Once this “make area not walkable” thing starts working. Which it won’t for now, because I’m moving on. Not sure what I’ll work on today, but pathfinding won’t be it, that much I know.

I’ll start a little later than usual today, because I have to go to the grocery store first. I’m super hungry for some reason, it’s almost as if I haven’t eaten anything yesterday. See you guys tomorrow!

Well, I knew it wouldn’t last. I just didn’t expect it to fail this spectacularly. Day 4 was a disaster. The brain just wouldn’t work, at all, no matter what. Every time I would try to code something, my mind would just…sort of go blank, without me even realizing it would do it. I would snap out of it about 10 minutes later, realizing I was just staring at the screen. I wasn’t even *thinking* anything really, I wasn’t distracted, I would just sort of pass out with my eyes open for a few minutes.

I tried to get back into it time and time again, for about 2 hours. Then I gave up, tried again in the evening, with similar results. It just didn’t work out today. I knew this would happen eventually, as I said in the first post, the years of drinking definitely did some damage. So I’m not beating myself up about it. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, I wasn’t being lazy, it just didn’t happen.

I’m probably going to regret this, but I’m doing LD28 too. For the first time. I’m probably going to use Unity, but if I get a good idea that would work better with a different setup, I’m going to change on the fly.

Problems I see coming at me:

– Timezone/Sleep schedule issues

– No good ideas

– Overthinking /Overestimating what I can do in 2 days

– My incredibly slow brain being stupid again

Lets hope for a good theme. But to be honest, I’m not super happy with what’s being upvoted so far :/ We’ll see..

While not everything went right, I’m “somewhat okay” with how my game turned out. It isn’t anything special and has a few annoying bugs I couldn’t fix in time, but you can see that it’s supposed to be a game.

One thing however annoyed me to no end. I can’t draw. At all. So that is something I really need to fix. I don’t understand colors, dithering, palettes, animation,  anything like that. I’ll probably enter the next LD as well, so my goal until then is to become a bit better at art. Something a little more like this would be nice:

So where do I start? I imagine if anyone knows it’s you guys. What are some good resources to learn 2D pixel art, including animation?