[v2.28] – 2022-09-26
LADIES AND GENTS.
I present to you, major version update 2 of this big ol’ biological meat computer.
I am now officially a video game developer. Not a very good one (just yet), but I am one nonetheless.
My first game Don’t Cold has been shipped to the digital shelves of Itch.io, and you can download it for free over there if you’d like. There’s a 50/50 chance it won’t work on your machine due to a bug in the rendering. But let’s just ignore that 😉
/resources
- Making performant dynamic manual memory management in C feel almost like garbage collection – a post by Ryan Fleury
- John Carmack on Inlined Code
/minimal-devlogs
I’ve started a new video series that I’m calling the minimal devlogs. Which’ll get published weekly in conjunction with these Changelogs.
My rationale behind the return to YouTube was pretty straightforward…
I need money to fund this Airbnb. And I need it yesterday.
I’m currently sitting at -$2,064.22 AUD on the ol’ budget. But my whole plan for getting out of the red has been set in motion, as discussed in this video.
So far, that plan is turning out a lot better than I expected. For a couple reasons.
- Twitch
Now that I’ve got my own space, I realised I could return to live streaming development on Twitch. That’s pulling in around $50 each work day. - The donations on itch are a lot higher than I thought they’d be
Despite it being a half-baked game that’s barely fun and doesn’t even launch for a handful of people, a lot of y’all have been really generous with the support over there. So far it’s made $500 AUD from “sales” (on a free game) which kinda blows my mind.
Seriously, thank you <3
All in all, I’m on track for a steady climb out of overdraft during the next couple of months and am not stressing one lil’ bit.
I’m actually really enjoying editing these videos. Probably because the bar of expectations is practically non-existent and there’s no stress to make a “good video.”
It reminds me of the days when I was first starting to make YouTube videos. Just creating them for the sake of sharing my progress. No aiming for views or entertainment, just raw productive vibes.
The thing is, recently I’ve been seeing YouTube as this evil thing that distracted me too much from game development. Yet in a sense, it actually is game development. It’s just the marketing side of the equation.
At any given moment, I can return to the main channel, make a really solid entertaining video about a game of mine and have it reach hundreds of thousands of eyeballs.
Which is absolutely mind-boggling.
Even right now, after making a basic second channel video on this first game. There’s been over 1 thousand downloads with very little effort on my part.
I think it’s safe to say that I’ve got the marketing department covered for now. My next bottleneck is figuring out how to actually make a solid game in the first place.
To that end…
/up-next
It’s time to get cracking on this next project.
I got a little carried away trying to maximise work hours in the last project. As a result, the important things in my life like writing, studying, and this changelog were the first to get scarified.
So as discussed in my latest blog post, I’ll be taking a more sustainable route from here on out. After all, I’ve still got a long way to go until the 26th Game Z is finished.
For this next project, I’ll be building out a line renderer and making a very simple game with it. I won’t be getting too caught up in designing a good game for this one. I’ll be focusing more on the tech side of things alongside some shippability issues that came up in the last project (main menu, settings, crashes, etc).
Nonetheless, I will still treat it like an end-to-end game project and ship it.
It’ll be a side-scroller, so I might try my hand at a smooth player controller if I’ve got the time.
My main focus is going to be figuring out a solid workflow for writing shaders in Telescope with d3d11. Which was something I set out to do with the old Ex Nihilo pixel simulation project, but I ended up not needing to do that.
If you wanna drop by and see what’s cookin throughout the week, I’ll be streaming as much as possible on Twitch. (I’m live right now if you’re reading this in the first 8hrs or so)
That’s all I’ve got for ya this week. Sorry for the radio silence over the last few weeks, was busy crunching like a mad man on this first game.
Best of luck with the week ahead! Cya in the next one.
– randy