This week I’ve been tweaking the user interface of Tetria’s Tower. It’s gotta be pretty, and it’s gotta be functional.

Subscribe now

I’m pleased with most of it so far. The exception is… the freaking map.

What’s the problem?

The nature of Tetria’s Tower requires that the player have tools to develop a strong understanding of where the rooms are within the tower — in three dimensions.

Everything I try to make it pretty makes it less functional.

The more functional it is, the uglier it looks.

Here’s a few screenshots of the map as-is.

There are three main components to the map: the tower boundaries, the rooms, and a player position indicator.

What I like:

• The player can rotate the tower to get different views of the rooms.

• Transparency allows the player to see how all the rooms fit together.

What I don’t like:

• The tower boundaries look ugly and are visually confusing.

• It’s not easy to see a path from point A to point B.

• The look of the tower and the rooms don’t fully jive with the look of the UI.

How am I going to fix it?

(Help please)

I need to do some research about how other developers have solved this problem. I’m sure I’m not the first person to develop a game with needs akin to this one, but I haven’t found a game where I think their solution would work for me. I am very open to suggestions on where to look for inspiration.

I have a couple ideas of how to address the map. I’d love to hear any additional ideas or feedback on what I should try first. Here is the spaghetti I’m already thinking of throwing at the wall:

Rework the Tower Boundaries

I’m displeased with the look of the boundaries as-is. I’m for sure going to change the way they look. I’m thinking they should have fewer or no harsh lines so that the whole map looks less cluttered.

Rework the Rooms

The rooms are what I’m most pleased with right now, but maybe I could change them in a way that makes it more obvious where doors are positioned.

Change the PC Location Indicator

I’m for sure going to make the PC location indicator prettier. Maybe a little flower?

A Second View Mode

I’m starting to think I might need to implement an ‘orthogonal view’ mode where you can see a cross section of the tower from above, below, or any side. This would essentially be a second map system, which is non-trivial for me to develop. I think it would probably be useful… but I’m a bit worried that if I pursue this, I am just opening a whole new can of UI problems.

What next?

I’ll probably follow up on the map next time I post. The big question mark on development time left is the map, so once I figure that out, I think I’ll have a release date for the demo!

Subscribe now

Follow me elsewhere!

I’ve set up an itch.io page for Good Gourd Games. I’d like to post more technical developer logs on there, and when I release the demo for Tetria’s Tower, it will be one of the places you can access it from.

I also set up a bluesky, where the game dev community is very active.

It’s been a while since I posted. I keep feeling like I would rather just spend time developing rather than writing, but I woke up today feeling excited to share some screenshots!

Subscribe now

What’s left?

Something that is really exciting is that I actually don’t have a ton of programming left to do for a playable demo. I also don’t have a ton of major work to do. The list is mostly making it pretty and small functionality tweaks.

Music

This I’ve been really excited about learning new skills as part of this. However… I just don’t have that same interest in making music that I do for the art and functionality of it. My original plan was to find some music to license, but I recently had a friend ask if he could make music for it and I’m very excited about that.

Dialogue

The tutorial and demo dialogue isn’t super extensive, but I do still need to finish it.

Keys & Inventory

I need to create art for each room’s key and for the various items that can be added to the player’s inventory. I also am not stoked about the look of the inventory currently.

Map

The map is currently functional, but I’m not entirely pleased with it yet. I may write a separate article about the challenges of a readable 3D map and see if I can solicit some opinions on it. Here’s how it’s looking now:

Loading Screen

I have a loading screen built, but I just need to plug it in still.

What about the trinket simulator?

Don’t worry - I haven’t forgotten about this one! I’ve learned a lot since I first started that game, and I think I want to scrap a lot of what I’ve done. I’m planning to visit Charlotte in person for a week this summer and we will do a personal game jam.

Subscribe now

So, naturally, I’ve completely disregarded that advice and built my own plugin.

The main reasons I chose to do it this way are:

• I want to understand, in depth, how this thing works.

• I wanted to learn to make an editor plugin for Godot.

What I’ve built for myself is, right now, just for myself. That said, it’s only a couple tweaks away from being usable by other devs for their games.

Subscribe now

What do I need for dialogue?

First, I need a way to save off dialogue. I built an organizational format to save off dialogue information, including:

• A list of dialogue options for the player to select from

• Non-player character dialogue

• Conditions controlling whether certain dialogue options are accessible yet

• How a dialogue option will affect the state of the game

Second, I have to be able to edit my dialogue. Godot has a built in inspector, but it’s not the friendliest for visualizing my data.

Luckily, Godot’s graph control structures are fresh out of beta, which means I was able to use them when building my editor.

In my example below, you can think of the editor as more or less a flowchart. There are three types of blocks you can add to the flowchart:

• Start: This block defines which NPC dialogue and/or PC dialogue options can be starting points for a conversation. When we start up the dialogue in game, we choose from this list.

• NPC: Defines which non-player character is speaking, and what they are saying.

• PC Options: Defines a list of options for the player to choose from.

Lastly, and arguably most importantly, I built an engine to display and process dialogue.

Usage

I’ve been intentional about making this system something that is easy for me to pick up and drop into another game. So, I expect to continue using it in perpetuity, or at least until I decide it’s garbage and make a newer, better version.

In order to make it friendly for other folks to pick up and use, I would need to write some documentation and make a couple quality of life improvements. But… I am tired of working on this tool and want to move on, so that’s a project for another day.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Concept

Meet Phil.

Phil is a wall sconce. Well, more accurately, Phil is a hivemind comprised of all the wall sconces in the tower.

This first drawing of Phil was done in Procreate. I limited myself to spending about 30 minutes for this. If I plan to model something in Blender, I don’t like to spend too much time on the concept art.

Modelling

When I am referencing an image for modelling a new object, I like to just pop the image in and work off of it directly. I toggle transparency on to make sure I’m following my reference close enough. I toggle it off to make sure my model doesn’t look funky.

You’ll notice that the model itself is relatively low-poly (in other words, it looks blocky). I’ve chosen this style for a few reasons:

• Performance. More geometry on each model is more geometry to load in-game. Keeping things simple here keeps things simple down the road for me. I won’t have to be so picky about how much of the game’s area can be loaded at once.

• Nostalgia. Older games tend to be low-poly for aforementioned performance reasons.

• I like working with constraints. I find it forces me to be a little more creative than I otherwise would.

After I wrapped up Phil’s model, I threw in some simple lights and textures just to get a feel of what it’ll look like. For someones like Phil, though, I’m going to paint them in Procreate on my tablet.

Texture

In theory, I could use Blender like I use Procreate. It has the same functionality and doesn’t freak out as much if I did a bad job modelling. However, I don’t have an artist’s tablet that I hook up to my computer. I have an iPad. Which, I’m sure someone has created a tool to use as an artist’s tablet with a computer.

All this to say, I don’t have to hop between Blender and Procreate, but I really like Procreate.

I draw directly on the 3D model that I’ve imported…

…and it spits out an image that is mapped onto my object.

Importing

After fiddling with the textures in Blender and futzing with the color and intensity of the light in Godot, Phil is looking very handsome.

There’s a sconce on either side of my starting room right now. I have a simple script that models a flickering flame with an adjustable sine wave. Sometime, I will add some wavelength variation at some point to make the flicker seem more random.

You’ll also notice I don’t actually have a flame yet. I think I want to ‘billboard’ the flame so that it’s just a static image that’s always facing you, rather than trying to use a 3D model for it.

I also think Phil might need a smoother transition into the wall, perhaps either mounted on a board (easy) or growing directly out of it (less easy but more fun).

All that said, I am choosing to be done with the visual work on Phil for now. I could work on them forever, and I’ll likely return to them later on in the project.

Subscribe now

I haven’t written in a bit. Partially holidays, partially health related, but mostly just because I haven’t felt like it. I’ve still been developing, though!

Subscribe now

I took a bit of a break from the larger trinket project to work on some other stuff. I ought to get back to it - I want to get the first hunt location finished. It’ll be easier now that Charlotte and I are both back from the holiday fog and doing weekly studio time calls again.

That said, I’ve been mostly working on two games lately:

1. A dinky two player game.

2. Another larger project that is more of a solo endeavor - at least for now.

Dinky Game

I last-minute decided to participate in the 20 Second Game Jam, which was super awesome! I highly recommend playing some of the game because that 20 second limit forces some really awesome creativity. My personal favorite is Rosetta Prime.

My submission (Gettem!) is, I think, the only co-op submission. That said, it’s hard to be confident in that statement with over 600 submissions.

It’s definitely pretty far from perfect or refined, but I think it’s a fun proof of concept. Definitely let me know if you play and there’s something wrong, but don’t hold me to actually fixing it.

There’s also a 20 Million Second Game Jam that is open to folks who participated in this one! I think I’ll participate, but mostly work on it when I want some easy wins.

Tetria’s Tower

Over the holidays, my wife, my brother in law, and I were playing Blue Prince. If you’re not familiar, the premise of this game is that your rich uncle passed away, and as a result you have inherited a mansion whose rooms change every day. As you proceed through doors in the mansion, you pick one of three rooms to add to the layout next.

I love this game. The art style and atmosphere are perfect, and I’ve always loved the idea of confusing and moving layouts. I felt really inspired to start doodling and playing around in blender on this idea that’s been rattling around in my head.

Premise

You wake up.

Who am I?

Where am I?

Wait… am I in a giant bird cage?

You must explore, solve puzzles, and perform (often embarrassing) tasks for a bunch of weird little guys in order to learn about the tower you’ve found yourself in, how you got here, and the elusive witch who calls this place home.

Most importantly, how do you leave? And do you even want to?

Mechanics

Keys

The player will be able to, through interacting with non-player characters and solving puzzles, acquire keys. When a key is used on a door, the room that opens will depend on the key. Each key corresponds with a specific room. E.g., a moss-covered key may lead to a conservatory, or a gold key may lead to a treasure room.

Rooms

Each room will occupy a three dimensional space. The challenge of this game will come from the spatial reasoning required to fit your rooms within the bounds of the tower. If you’ve ever done a puzzle where you need to fit the pieces into a certain shape, the idea here is similar.

Here’s four perspectives on six rooms fitting together:

What next?

I think from here on out, I’ll be splitting my time equally between Tetria’s Tower and the trinket game (which, by the way, we’ve landed on Tchotchke Tales for a title).

My next post will likely be about my process creating and shading assets for Tetria’s Tower! I’ve figured out a nice workflow that I am pretty excited to share.

Subscribe now

I thought this week I’d share this gallery of some of the trinkets I’ve modelled, and talk a bit about how I go about it.

I have a whole folder of reference photos that Charlotte has taken of the trinkets that she owns. Every trinket I’ve modelled is something that she has on her own personal shelf or somewhere in her home.

She takes photos of the trinket from a bunch of angles, then compiles it into one PNG with a transparent background. I use it inside of Blender as a reference while I’m modelling.

I decided to record myself on that last one - here is a very sped up version of it!

Subscribe now

I suppose it hasn’t really been three months of straight development. I spent some time renovating my office. I had a wedding in the mix. We also have a new puppy now, which is why I dropped the ball on posting last week. She’s settling into a nice routine, though, so I’m much less exhausted this week. Her name is Maple and she’s the sweetest shoe bandit you’ll ever meet.

I digress, let me get into it.

Subscribe now

What accomplishments am I particularly happy with?

Because this is completely new to me, I felt like I was taking a total shot in the dark when I was organizing my timeline for this year. I wasn’t giving myself enough credit, though, because I actually did a pretty good job nailing down how long it would take me. I’m on track to have a minimum viable product to put out there as a demo to solicit feedback sometime in Q1 of next year!

Do I wish I had done anything different?

I wish I’d half-assed more in the beginning. There were a couple times that I got really stuck on making something perfect that I have now ended up scrapping completely. For example, I spent a ton of time on a wood texture for a dresser, but now I decided that it looks nicer as a solid color. I also meticulously added collision to a whole room, only to realize that I don’t really need or want to have it there.

What was more difficult than I anticipated?

Learning to use Blender, I spent a lot of time thinking, “I can’t be the first person to need to do this, there must be a better way.” Thing is, it’s like a whole different language! Because of that, I really struggled at first to A) formulate a good question and B) once I’d managed to ask my question, I struggled to understand the answer provided to me.

For example, there are so many ways to add more complex geometry to an object, but right when I was starting to learn, I had a really hard time figuring any of them out because I had to look up so many definitions in order to ask my questions and understand the answers!

Needless to say, this self-taught Blender thing has resulted in a lot of iterative google searches and a multitude of open tabs. Even though it’s more of a challenge than I realized, it’s been a fun one to tackle.

What was easier than I anticipated?

I am a social creature, so I find it a lot easier for me to motivate myself when other people are involved. I was scared about whether I have the discipline it takes to decide to work on a project every day even if I’m the only one holding myself accountable.

Turns out, I’ve had next to no trouble with this. I think there’s a couple things making this easier for me:

1. I made the office nice. If I didn’t like this room, I wouldn’t be able to spend much time in here.

2. I have my coffee and my breakfast in the office. I don’t work while I eat, it’s just to get me in front of my computer before I can get distracted.

3. Charlotte and I have weekly-ish ‘studio time’ on Discord. I get to share what I’m excited about, ask for feedback, and spend time just working in parallel with her. It’s really awesome to get to work with her.

What do I enjoy?

Variety. I love that I am getting to use skills that I have from my professional background while also stretching the learning muscles on new skills like 3D modelling and working with a game engine.

What don’t I enjoy?

I haven’t found anything that I dislike doing so far, but there are some things that I used to do as part of my last job that I liked but I’m not getting to do now:

• I miss working with other developers, particularly fresh grads.

• Although I still have to do quite a bit of thinking, I’m not working on as challenging of logic as what I used to work on.

• Because I worked with public sector clients, I often felt like I was making a broad positive impact for the general public. The stakes are simply much lower here.

So, what’s the verdict on game development?

Simply put, I’m having a blast. I feel like I’m proving my worth to myself. I’m really proud of what I've learned so far. I still don’t know if this is something I’m interested in pursuing as a career long-term, but either way it’s been such a rewarding experience.

Subscribe now

Three Month Reflection

In a couple weeks it’ll be three months since I started this project! I am going to take some time to evaluate everything I’ve done so far. I’ll probably journal all my thoughts from that and drop them in my post two weeks from now. Here’s what I’m planning to reflect on:

• What am I particularly happy with so far?

• Do I wish I had done anything different?

• What was more difficult than I thought?

• What was easier than I thought it would be?

• What do I enjoy?

• What don’t I enjoy?

• Do I like game development so far?

If anyone has any input or thoughts on other good reflection topics, please let me know!

Leave a comment

Tying Up Loose Ends

I spent this week setting myself up for building the first trinket hunt location. With an open-ended project like this, I could keep working on one little detail forever, so I also have to decide to move along. It’s a lot easier said than done for me, though. In order to trick my brain from unsticking itself, I have to write basically all my thoughts on the subject down before I can move on without waffling back to what I was working on before.

All that to say: I am choosing to be done with the interface between the inventory box and the trinket shelf functionality so far. After I have the base functionality of the game down, at that point I’ll do another pass on everything to tweak until I’m happy. My trinkets that I’ve got so far are a little on the big side so as I put together more of them I’ll have to be mindful of the size of the trinket shelf slots.

Experimental Break

I also spent some time tinkering with the World Environment node in Godot. It basically allows me to add visual to everything in the 3D environment of the game, which makes it easier to tie all the visuals together in a cohesive way.

A couple times I’ve made a GIF from screen recordings to use in a post. The result often has a sort of compressed color that I think is kind of neat, so while I was playing around, I decided to recreate it on purpose. I am not sure whether this fits with Charlotte’s vision, but it was good practice, I think!

While I was gainfully employed, I had a lot on my plate. In order to handle it, I had to be extremely conscientious of what I was spending time on. It’s been difficult yet freeing to relax that mindset. Spending time on something like this, where my intention is 100% experimental, with no thought to even use any of the end result, wouldn’t have been something I let myself do.

Subscribe now

Upcoming: Trinket Hunting!

I’m excited to start building the first trinket hunt location - a junk drawer in the player character’s mother’s home. I’m looking forward to spending a bunch of time in Blender next week!

I also will need to set up a mechanism that allows the player to navigate between two different locations. I’ve created a phone that allows the player to access a map, and I’ve built the control for that map as well, although at the moment it is definitely… how do I say… rudimentary.

Sure, it’s ugly now, but I’ll be able to replace the visuals with any image for the map, and I’ve got the underlying functionality of the buttons in place.

I’m excited to have this new section of this game to work on and show next week!

Subscribe now

I took about a three week break to prep for my wedding, attend said wedding, and go on a honeymoon. Truly, it has been the best few weeks of my life.

Since returning to this project Monday, I’ve been thinking a lot about how lucky I am. I have a kick-ass, stunning wife who I get to go on adventures with. Then, thanks to her support, when we come home from our adventures, I get to go back to “work” on this fulfilling, creative project.

Subscribe now

I’m back! Inventory time!

Monday I mostly spent remembering what the hell I was working on three weeks ago. I cleaned up my to-do list, read the last post I wrote, and got back to work on the inventory system.

In most games with an inventory system, it is some variation of a grid or a list of items the player character has available to them.

Charlotte and I have a very specific vision for how the user interface feels in this game. Wherever possible, we want to avoid a flat user interface that lays on top of the screen. Instead, we want to build as much functionality as possible into the player’s environment itself.

We want our inventory system to feel more like a three dimensional box that you’re holding, with scraps of tape on the box functioning as the navigation buttons. This is definitely doable and not too hard, but it is for sure trickier than just using the UI tools that are provided in Godot.

Technically, I could accomplish easier this with 2D still images of my 3D models, but I’m having more fun making it work in 3D. Plus - if I want to go back in and tweak a visual later I am hoping that doing it this way will save me the headache of having to redo as much of a scene to accommodate the tweak.

Elephant Assessment

A few weeks ago, I talked about eating the elephant, which makes the title of this subsection make sense.

Here are the parts of my inventory elephant:

Trinket Organization

Even though we’re rethinking the inventory feel a bit, we’re still abiding by the golden rule: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We’re sticking with the trusty grid system.

I modelled a really simple box that I plan to add to and stylize later, then attached a script that takes all the player’s collected trinkets and arranges them in a grid based on the selected sorting method. I’ve made the number of rows and columns dynamic so that I don’t have to manually resize it while tweaking.

Trinket Selection

I’ve written a shader to outline trinkets when the cursor hovers over them. I’m like 90% happy with it, but I will probably revisit it at some point.

I’m having a little trouble with the built-in signals that I’m using to toggle the visibility of the outline when the cursor enters and exits the area of the screen that the trinket is on, but once I figure that out I’ll move on from this until I get some feedback from Charlotte.

Tape Buttons

For buttons, I will be modelling scraps of packing tape with the button labels stuck to the box. My current plan is to use the same outline shader as above but change the color for them.

Do Not Shake

Charlotte, bless her heart, is a pack rat. I have a lot of memories of going through stuff with her in her bedroom growing up. It was an organized chaos. She had a million doo-dads, somehow knew where they all were, and never threw anything away. She has retained this trait. We want to bring the chaotic feeling of digging through a box of hers to the game, but we also don’t want to frustrate our player.

The genius idea that Charlotte had was to include a label on the box that says “Do Not Shake.” When clicked, the box will shake and all the trinkets will all fall to the bottom of the box, giving it a feel similar to rummaging through a box at a yard sale searching for something that sparks joy. I think this is so fun as an optional feature, so it’s what I’m saving for last on the inventory.

Subscribe now

Technical Issues

Tuesday, I noticed that my web browser kept giving me ‘improper memory access’ errors. When I restarted to see if that would fix the issue, my computer ended up in a boot loop where I couldn’t even fully boot up my machine before it would crash again. Even in safe mode! For a while, I was concerned I’d have to go through the pain of a fresh Windows install, but luckily I was able to boot up with just command prompt and run a disk check, which fixed the issue.

My best guess is that there was some sort of memory leak that was occurring while trying to read from or write to my SSD, but I’m not sure what the original culprit actually was. I checked my drivers but they all seem up to date and fine now. I’m very open to any post-mortem troubleshooting advice since I would like to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Technical Triumphs

Wednesday, I finally set up remote desktop and a VPN so that I can use my nice machine with a good graphics card from anywhere I’d like! Now, if I want to use a coworking space or go on a trip, I’m not limited to just what my laptop can handle. I’m pretty stoked about that; variety is the spice of life.

Next Week

Next week, I’ll be integrating the trinket shelf with the inventory! I’ll need to figure out how to switch between cameras to do that. After that, I feel like I’ll have rounded a corner and can start branching into the world map and and a trinket hunt location soon.

Subscribe now

But who am I and why am I on Sarah’s substack?

I guess for all intents and purposes you could call me the art director of Good Gourd Games? At the least, for our current project, the trinket simulator game. If you want to read about the origins of the game idea you can check out that link which leads to my page on it in my digital garden (aka my digital creative brain dump/organization place).

I’ve been a lot of things in my life but primarily I consider myself to be a multi-media artist. I do a little bit of everything art wise but some of my favorites have been drawing, printmaking, sewing, and miniatures. I’m currently working on two big letterpress shelves and on restoring my grandmother’s original trinket shelf that I enjoyed growing up, which she’s now passed on to me. You could say some hobbies are indeed genetic haha.

Video games were never something that I intended to make but I’ve realized that I have more passion for them then I expected. As kids Sarah introduced me to computer games and they stuck with me until I was old enough to buy my own. Since then we’ve both garnered an appreciation for video games as an art form and a medium to tell stories visually and mechanically.

So what have you been doing the past few weeks as part of this project?

Well, honestly, to me doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing much but I have to remind myself, that’s a voice in my head. I also work and do a whole bunch of creative stuff, so I find balances best I can. But, if I could sum up into two things it would be The Vision and the Why.

The Vision: What Should the Game Look Like

One of my favorite things to do to loosen up on a creative project is to pull out my children’s easel, a roll of drawing paper, and my markers and just go to town making huge doodles and sketches of the concepts in my head. The large space unlocks something in my brain to be more free with my linework and focus on quantity instead of quality. So using these tools I began working on a large storyboard to visualize what I saw our game looking like in our head. Twelve feet or so of paper later I came up with a story board that I was really happy with about how I could see the game beginning.

The red marker indicates notes on mechanics or specific details that I wanted in certain places. So far some motifs I definitely want to include are thought bubbles, memory quotations, and the feeling of “cozy but a bit despondent”. I showed it to Sarah and she began working on bringing the vision from 2D storyboard to a 3D game model.

The Why: Story and Motivation

In the beginning I didn’t consider much of a story, only that the game would be a cozy simulator for trinket collecting with lore baked into items and locations. I wanted it to be a bit autobiographical: the PC (player character) collecting small trinkets to bring joy in a bleak situation. But why is the PC doing this? So I began to ponder the “whys” in the shower and on my commutes to and from work. And one “why” leads to another why and often to a where and a what. And that’s half the fun of it!

• Why does the PC collect trinkets?

  • To brighten up their basement room

• Why is the PC in a basement room?

  • Due to life circumstances they had to move back in with their parent (or parents—haven’t decided yet)

• Where does the PC find trinkets?

  • In the town their parent(s) live in at various locations

• Why does the town have so many spots to find trinkets?

  • My idea here is that the town is an artsy place with lots of public art displays that people can interact with, geocaching, an antique store, hidden shrines, etc. I still don’t even have a name for this town yet. I’d like to do research into places with that kind of vibe to get some inspiration.

There’s also another set of questions to ask: why should the player care? What motivates the player of the game to continue playing? I wanted to set up a vibe perhaps in the tutorial with a “hook” to imply there is more to the game then meets the eye. That is what the storyboard outlines.

• Shows PCs bare basement room

• Goes to first location, which is the PC’s parent(s) home.

• A memory is brought back in a description of said location talking about a junk drawer

• The PC hunts for trinkets in said drawer and finds a brochure talking about the secret town treasure that nobody has ever found.

  • This implies there are secrets to be found while exploring this “world”

  • PC in game thinks “If I find this I’d be able to move out and get an apartment of my own”

  • Brochure unlocks a second location: a museum gift shop!

These are the kinds of thoughts that occupy my head when I think about the game. In GGG it feels like Sarah is the technical arm and I’m the artistic arm and in-between us is a bouncing of ideas that are starting to culminate into an actual thing. Which is super cool! I struggle with bigger projects and it’s been exciting to work on one again and feel gradual success.

So What’s Next, Char?

Well, we did hit a bit of a hiccup with part of our original plan which was to scan trinkets from my own collection to turn into 3D models for assets. I assumed my iPhone could do the job but turns out my iPhone is too old. (poor people problems haha) So that was a bit disheartening for me. But! It’s only an obstacle. At the very least I have begun with PNG image placeholders for trinkets and have began writing down descriptions for them.

I’ve been looking at some cheaper 3D scanners (Including one named Moose! The same as Sarah’s son dog!) as a possible option. I also want to set up a “trinket photo booth” with a lightbox I have to try to create an optical environment to capture images and videos. Of course this will have to happen after wedding time, so hopefully I’ll have another update on that in the future!

In the meantime, mazel tov to the happy couple! Future Charlotte is so excited for the wedding. 💕

A little bummed and looking for direction, I decided to review my goals from last week. Turns out I can put a checkmark next to every single one of them. I guess feeling productive and actual progress aren’t necessarily correlated.

Well, cool! That makes me feel better. I’m definitely glad I had the foresight to start writing about my learning process because I know my brain loves to trick me into thinking I haven’t accomplished anything.

So, here’s what I accomplished this week:

Blender Performance Issues

One of my goals from last week was to figure out why Blender kept crashing on me. Turns out I was correct with my guess assessment (guessessment?) of the culprits.

At first, I was convinced the best bang for my buck would be building a PC myself, but while I was looking on eBay for parts, I stumbled across a listing for a refurbished computer with a nice graphics card and plenty of RAM listed for less than it would cost me to purchase all the parts separately. I was super skeptical since this seemed too good to be true, but the person selling had a ton of great reviews and has been established on eBay for 10 years. So, I went ahead and bought the ding dang thing and it’s working awesome!

Trinket Shelf and Inventory

I wanted my trinket shelf to be semi-functional by the end of this week, and I can say that I think I’ve accomplished that by making the trinket shelf actually able to hold things, and nailing down the basic functionality of selecting trinkets from the inventory and putting them on the shelf. It’s not done by any stretch of the imagination, plus I want to save the details of how it works for another post, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Materials

I also wanted to learn more about effectively applying textures and colors to my assets.

I can happily say I’ve learned how to do that in multiple ways! In this photo, I’ve used four different methods of creating textures:

Keep it Simple, Stupid

For something really simple like the cord and socket on the lightbulb, all I needed to do was pick a color for it.

Shader Scripts

For the brick walls here, I actually didn’t use Blender at all. I learned how to write a script that generates the position and color for every pixel in the wall’s texture. I was also able to set it up so that, if I want to, I can change the brick dimensions and color:

In this moment, I am realizing I named the depth and radius variables Brick Depth and Brick Radius when it would be more accurate to call them Grout Depth and Grout Radius. I’ll have to fix that.

Of the methods of adding a material that are more complex than just picking out a color, this was easily the most inside my comfort zone.

StandardMaterial3D

Another way to add a texture without pulling Blender into it is to use the friendly StandardMaterial3D that Godot offers. It’s basically a pre-written shader script with a bunch of input options that let you create the look you’re going for. I used this method for the glass of the light bulbs and the stained concrete floors.

Get fancy with it

Inside of Blender, I learned how to create a texture map, then bake it onto an image of my object’s UV. Yeah, I felt like this, too, while I was reading and watching tutorials:

To translate that into something more understandable, I learned how to give Blender instructions about creating the material for my object (a texture map). This is where my understanding is still the shakiest, so I will not elaborate further.

I also learned how to create a 2D image of all the different sides of my object. For example, think about how a sewing pattern turns a 3D object into a 2D object. That’s basically what a UV is.

I don’t remember what UV stands for, which brings me to the conclusion that it isn’t important enough to look it up for this post.

In order to retain a more complex material like this when I export what I’ve made to Godot, I have to tell Blender to “bake” my instructions onto my UV. I.e., I’m telling it to apply my instructions to my sewing pattern. It’s a lot friendlier for rendering and for exporting this way. The baked texture ends up looking like this:

When it wraps itself around my object and we add lighting, it looks like this:

Now that I’ve written this out, I can’t believe I almost wrote off all the work I’ve done with materials this week as unproductive. Maybe it just felt too fun to count it as productivity.

Coming Up

I want to proof of concept creating UVs without any materials baked onto them, drawing on them elsewhere, then importing the image back in and using it as my texture.

I’ll also work on finishing up the inventory system, which I’m excited about.

That said…

I’ll be getting married next week! So I won’t be working very much, if at all. We’re also taking our honeymoon directly after that, so I will not have much to talk about until maybe the week of the 20th, but most likely the week of the 27th.

Subscribe now

A core mechanic of the trinket simulator game I’m working on is a shelf upon which to display the player’s trinkets. My friend, Charlotte, sent me this picture of one of the shelves from her home that she uses for her own doo-dads, and I decided that recreating a simplified version of it would be a good first Blender venture for me.

Well… not first. Long live Spaglié.

Trial and Error, Emphasis on Error

One of my favorite methods when learning something new is to do little to no prior research and just start trying stuff, researching as I run into walls.

I like this strategy because it gives me lots of room to make dumb mistakes. My mind operates better on why than it does on what. For example, if I read about the correct way to do something, it just slides right off my brain so I can’t retain it. On the other hand, if I spend a lot of time doing something the slow, bad way, I understand why I should do it the correct way and it sticks to my brain for much longer.

Is this the fastest way to learn? Absolutely not. When I had a job as a consulting developer, I would never employ this as my primary strategy because I simply couldn’t give my managers the second hand stress of knowing how often I’m scrapping and redoing my work, especially if it is a dependency for someone else’s work.

So, I thoroughly enjoyed making a ton of small dumb mistakes like taking too long to realize I could select an entire face without selecting each individual vertex or being unable to see the color/texture I’d given my object. If I were to do it again, it would probably take me less than half the time this go-around because of all the mistakes I wouldn’t make this time.

Behold, a trinket shelf!

I’m happy with how it’s turned out. I’m not going to fuss too much more with the texture or coloring for now. It’s functional for my next steps on the game.

Subscribe now

Next on the Docket

Blender Research

Now that I’ve done my spaghetti at the wall project, it’s time for me to do a little reading and watch some videos to see how I can improve my process. There are three main things I’d like to figure out:

Performance

I knew going into this that Blender might be a bit much for my current setup. It crashed—a lot. My possible culprits, from what I think is least to most likely, are:

• CPU: I don’t think this is it, based on what I was seeing in task manager and the fact that we originally bought this machine for my fiancée, with the intended purpose that it would be able to perform processing on large sets of data.

• Memory: I did notice that occasionally my memory usage was skyrocketing - and I do think that I’d at minimum get some speed improvements if I added more.

• GPU: My computer’s CPU has an integrated GPU. This is almost certainly an issue.

My current computer is an all in one from HP, which I’m not sure I can crack open and modify easily.

I’m going to do some research on what hardware resources Blender uses and when it uses them in order to decide whether I think I can fix my performance issues without building a new PC.

Material

The way you add colors and textures to objects in Blender is by creating and assigning a material to it. There are so many words that I don’t know in the material editor that I can’t effectively guess and check my way into understanding how to use it. I think I need to watch some tutorials (in 2x speed, of course) for this.

Sculpting

I also want to be able to use the sculpting functionality, which also means I would like to learn how to easily add more geometry to an object I’ve already built. The only ways I can figure out to make that happen seem slow and tedious. On the other hand, I would think a lot of folks need to do this on the regular, so I’m almost 100% positive that there’s a faster way to do it that I just haven’t figured out yet.

Trinket Shelf and Inventory

Now that I have a trinket shelf model, I want to drop it into our game so that the player can futz with how they want to display their trinkets. I’m hoping to have that semi-functional by the end of the week next week, which means I also ought to figure out how inventory is going to work.

I’ll touch base with Charlotte about how we want player inventory and displaying trinkets on the trinket shelf to feel for the player. She wants it to feel a little chaotic and disorganized; her first pitch to me was that the inventory could just be a box that you have to dump out and dig through in order to find the trinket you’re searching for. I agree that this fits the vibe and is cute and fun at first, but I worry that keeping the chaos slider set at 100% would get old quickly. I have a couple ideas I’m excited to bounce off of her that would keep that feel but improve the user experience.

Subscribe now

It boils down to a colloquialism that he has quoted to me about a million times. Anyone who has ever been managed by me has also heard me refer to it a million times.

What even is the elephant?

In order to figure out where to start gnawing, you have to figure out what your elephant even is.

What are its parts?

Which leg should you start with?

Do you really need to eat the bow-tie its wearing, too, or can you save that in a to-go box for another time?

I see that now may be a good time to abandon this metaphor.

For the first game I’m building with my dear friend, we’re envisioning a cozy game where the player character has been forced to move back to their hometown due to some Unfortunate Circumstance. The player will be able to travel to a location to hunt for trinkets and bring them home to arrange on a shelf. Through trinket descriptions and clues in the trinket hunting environments, they can learn more about the player character and their story.

There should also be some non-hunting locations like a shop and a library where you can interact with non-player characters who will help you learn more information about your trinkets.

What is my minimum viable product?

We have a lot of ideas, but I want a proof of concept with the core mechanics of the game before I start trying to use them to tell a story. For me, that means that the minimum viable product only includes:

• Trinkets

• A trinket shelf

• A map to navigate between locations

• Trinket hunting locations

We’ll add in non-player characters and other locations after we get these bare-bones done.

What should I start with?

The parts to this project have pretty linear dependencies. It doesn’t make sense to build a map without locations. It doesn’t make sense to build out locations or a trinket shelf without trinkets to put in them. So here’s the order of operations I’ve landed on:

1. Trinkets

2. Trinket shelf

3. Trinket hunting locations

4. Map

That said, these elements can and should be worked on simultaneously. It won’t just be one then the other. My timeline is going to be more overlapped like this:

Enough about the plan, what are you actually doing?

This Week

Time to return to the metaphor. I’ve taken a couple bites of my elephant this week!

• I wrote a base class for trinkets so that they’re easy to add and configure without reinventing the wheel every time.

• I created a simple user interface for viewing said trinkets. It took me forever to figure out how to get the text and viewport for the trinket to sit in front of the background. I definitely felt silly after I realized I just needed to add layers.

• I learned how to use Blender to create a super basic 3D model. In the future, I’ll be cleaning up and stylizing scans of my friend’s trinket collections!

I know, I’m a real artist.

Next Week

I’m working on populating the user interface with a selected trinket’s properties.

In order to test that effectively, I think it is time to start the trinket shelf! I’ll make something pretty basic in Blender. I doubt I’ll ever be able to make anything quite as pretty as that green head, but I’ll do my best.

Subscribe now

Lesson learned: In order to enjoy my day-to-day work, I need an office that is pleasant to spend time in.

Make it nice, but don’t spend a fortune.

Here’s the catch — as you’ll note, I’m currently unemployed. (My fiancée says self-employed, which might be more accurate but I really enjoy the uncomfortable chuckles I get when I go with unemployed.)

I didn’t set a particular budget for this project before I started. Instead, I took an iterative design approach to the office space:

1. Design something I want.

2. Assess the tools and materials I already have.

   1. Old, broken, or disused furniture

   2. Fasteners

   3. Paints, stains, and wallpaper

   4. Power tools and hand tools

3. Analyze cost and decide if I feel like what I’m spending is ‘worth’ it.

4. Assess what I’m missing to tweak or redesign my solution.

   1. Is there a similar and acceptable option that is more cost effective?

   2. Am I making use of what I already have on hand?

5. Rinse and repeat until I’m satisfied with the bang for my buck.

I can’t say I’d recommend this budget-last strategy to anyone who enjoys shopping recreationally, is short on tools, or values their time spent elsewhere more than time spent on a house project. This worked for me and my particular situation, but I couldn’t have taken this approach if I was still employed full-time. I also already had a lot of what I needed on hand, which my wallet appreciated.

In the end, I dreamt up a built in shelf with a floating desk across an entire wall of the office. Here’s how it’s looking so far:

Built In Shelf

One of the major dysfunctions of the current office was that there wasn’t a ton of storage space for frequently-used items. Luckily, I had some ugly shelves that we took down from the garage at my disposal. They were pretty easy for me to cut down to size and paint. From there, I just needed to frame out a tiny wall and add brackets for supporting the shelves. I slapped some wallpaper and trim on the outside of it and am pretty pleased with the results. I’m contemplating putting a stone mosaic on the bottom shelf, but I’m not certain, so I’ve left it unfinished for now.

Floating Desk

I had two desks, but they took up so much floorspace that the office was super cramped. I figured floating them along the wall would help alleviate that issue.

It originally seemed like a simple project. Frame out a support for the desks, mount it to the studs in the wall, and drop the desks on top. Unfortunately, there was a bunch of electric right where I wanted to put all my screws along the back wall, so I had to figure out how to support the desk without anchoring the frame there.

The answer I came up with was to only use the studs on the end walls to mount my frame, then add a bunch of heavy-duty brackets to make up the stability that I was missing.

I also cut some holes in the back of the desks to shove some recessed outlets into. I often find myself giving others second-hand cable management stress, so hopefully this will help calm the chaos.

Filling the Gap

Because of an outlet placement, I wasn’t able to easily place the shelf exactly where it would have needed to go to be exactly the length of my two floated desks.

I decided that the best way to fill this gap was going to be building a desk extension/shelf from some poplar I picked up from the hardware store. I still have a bit left to fill on that gap, which I think I’d like to match whatever I end up doing with the bottom of the shelf.

Cost

I’m pretty sure I’m done spending money on new material. I spent roughly $250:

• Lots of heavy duty brackets

• 2x4s

• Some pretty poplar boards, about $70 worth of which I have left over, probably the biggest ‘waste’. I’m not mad about it, though, because I already have ideas on how to use them.

• Wood screws

• Hole saw bits

• Trim

• Caulk

• Caulk gun

• Recessed outlets for the desk

All other materials and tools I already had on hand.

I definitely had some waste from mistakes and I could’ve gotten better deals on wood if I’d been willing to shop around a little more. If I had to start over with lessons learned, I think I could do it for less than $150 now.

Next Week

There’s also some odds and ends (more trim on the shelf, caulking, fill the rest of the gap, etc.) that I’ll work on with the goal of having the office completely set up and organized by the end of the month. I probably won’t actually write an update about it, though, since I’ve got all the hard parts done already.

Now that I have a nice space that I’m excited to spend time in, I’ve started working on the framework of a trinket for the trinket simulator game! I’m excited to share my progress and plan of action for the game as a whole next week.

Subscribe now

So, the job was pretty good… but I quit anyway. The long and short of it is that the cons of staying started to outweigh the pros. One of the ever-growing contributors to the cons list was the opportunity cost I was incurring. I want to learn something new and work on my own shit, at least for a little while.

My current plan is to take a year and learn as much as I can about game development with the goal of creating two games:

1. A trinket collecting cozy game, the brainchild of a dear friend I’ve had for twenty-some years. I think this will be a good learning game, since the nature of it makes it easy to start with a super small scope and expand as I desire.

2. A game of my own design, inspired by:

   • Blue Prince, which I love watching other people play but do not have the patience to play myself.

   • Faerie Fire, a third-party supplement for D&D 5e.

   • Some incredible Weird Little Guys and Haunted Animals that my aforementioned friend from the first game has been drawing lately.

I always roll my eyes when I see a LinkedIn post that says something along the lines of, “I’m forever grateful to Company for the incredible opportunity I had to generate revenue for you.” That said, I find myself relating to the sentiment (gross). I got to learn a bunch of technical, organizational, and interpersonal skills that I think set me up for success for the year I’ve planned for myself.

Do I know what I’m doing?

No, not really, but that’s the point. Also I’m gay, therefore how hard can it be?

Here are the tools I’m currently planning to use:

• Godot

• C#, written using Microsoft Visual Studio IDE

• Blender

• Something Git-based for version control

• Notion for task-tracking

I have wildly varying experience with these, ranging from “I’ve never used it before” (Blender) to “this is what I have worked with for years” (C#). I’m very open to suggestions, especially with regards to assets. Of course, I also reserve the right to ignore anything that anyone tells me (which I’m sure will earn me a couple I-told-you-so’s).

Why write about it?

A couple reasons! Mostly, I want to use this as a way to prove to future frustrated Sarah that she’s making progress. For a future employer, it also serves as proof that I was working on something during my year of unemployment. I also have some friends and family (hi) who have asked me to keep them updated, so this seems like a good mechanism for that.

Subscribe now