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Week in Review, 4th week of March, April 4/2/2023


Skipped a week, but here we are!


I put up a first game to Itch.io. I still got a lot of work to do making the profile look ok. The game itself is hardly more then an exercise from a book I’m working through from Pakt on Godot. It was meant to be an exercise in how to do this, or even if it is possible with minimal issues in Godot 4. And it appears to work just fine. Now I can push forward and keep working on game dev things.


It is April! The first month of Camp NanoWrimo. This year I’ll be starting the editing/rewriting process for the book I wrote in November. It is rough and doesn’t actually have a conclusion yet. I saved that for a decision to make after clearing up this draft. I need the character and events to speak to me and tell me how they want the story to resolve. I some some ideas and a larger direction, but THEY are who decide how the story gets there.


I know that the characters aren’t real. I’m not trying to say they exist somewhere and are talking to me. (although I can understand the peopl who think that… cuz it is weird sometimes) but iIn my head it is like a D&D campaign. I’m the DM, setting the scene. They are the characters and gotta play it out. 


Goals for this week: 


Week in Review, Third Week of March 3/19/2023


This week was a blast! I took the whole week off from coding or game dev and instead focused on other things.I had had numerous boxes of unbuilt furniture hanging around the house. I spent some time after work and got all of them build. There wasn’t actually that many of them. Just two bookshelves. It was extra fun because they were from different companies and so each had different ways to construct the same piece of furniture.


The basement now sports a new Mainstays Book shelf. We went with cheapo furniture on this one because if the basement were to ever flood (again) we didn’t want to feel bad about the furniture that gets destroyed. Consequently with finishing the book shelf I was able to move an older matching bookshelf from the general living area to the basement as well. Now both these shelves house all our boardgames and puzzles next to our new tablegaming area. Boo yeah! It also freed up some space in the living area making it look a little less cluttered.


We’ve had a kids training toilet seat for 15 years now. It original had a normal seat with a little clip to attach, raise, and lower a smaller seat for toddlers learning how to use the thing during potty training. It has long since stopped being used for tiny children and it was ready for replacement, due to chipping plastic spots. This is definitely an “I’m so old” moment because after a very short amount of searching I was able to procure a matching toilet seat. I was surprised because the current toilet is super ugly 1970’s yellow, but for some reason was readily findable on both Amazon and my local hardware store. Alas it wasn’t in stock locally so I was forced to get it from Amazon for cheaper.


I finally beat Terraria in Classic difficulty. I have been working on this game for so long! I’m glad to finally beat it. I’d like to do video series sort of like HappyDays on Youtube, but I’m not confident that my play is at a good enough level to do a video. I think I need to just go with it and do what I can. It has been so long since I’ve made videos.


Otherwise I’m starting to do the groundwork for starting a “real” blog talking about the Adirondack Fire Tower Challenge. It would be separate wordpress site and I’m excited to do the research on it. The goal here is to chose a finite sized topic with a clear start and finish point. I’d like to blog each of the hikes as well as research and history topics in between. Sounds fun to me.


Odd thing this week. I still worked on being productive but I didn’t focus on tech and I ended up being happy all week. like super high 10/10 mood. Did I just need a break from pushing? Or is this an indication of some other issue regarding my interests going forward. Time will tell.


Goals for next week:

-Review reverse outlining

-Review the Null Universe, (figure out technology)



Week in Review, Second Week of March 3/12/2023


None of my larger goals were completed from last week! First, work was very busy and extra hours so I was unable to put much extra time into study and blogging. That being said the first little demo type game is so close to being finished for Godot. I had said I was going to dive into Godot 4 as soon as it released. This was a bad timing kind of idea because 4 is so different from 3, and every single tutorial or book is written for old Godot, so a lot of time is spent trying to translate from old to new. In some ways this is great though, because I’m really getting in there and learning the concepts, it is however a bit slower then I would like.


Just a few weeks until Camp Nanowrimo. During April is when I’ll be focused on editing “Last One Get the Lights”. I’m nervous but excited. I intentionally left the document closed so it can clear out of my mind from November of last year until April. My mind is almost certainly ready to take a look at the little novel with fresh eyes. I still haven’t solved all the problems, but I am optimistice when I’m working on it ‘ll find a way.


I started reading “Persephone Station” by Stina Leicth. It is a cyperpunk adventure with a lot of special character and assassins. I’m only a little of the way through it so I don’t know to much yet. I like the humor and the style of the writing. In fact I feel like the texture of the writing is such that it would feel cyberpunk even without any of the usual setting. The language is crisp, modern, and feels snappy. That is a hard way to explain it. I don’t have the book next to me right now so I can’t quote it directly at this time. I am interested in figuring out how to bring such style to my own work.


On Sunday I finally, finally, finally, beat Terraria on Classic Difficulty. I’m so glad it is over, but now I’m hungry to pursue the next challenge. I had been trying to beat that damned Moon Lord for a long time. It took me at least 25 tries during this game save alone. Finally did it! And that feels good.


Goals for next week:




Week in Review: First week of March, 3/5/2023


It was a busy week full of snow storms, work, and meetings at work. Aside from that Godot 4.0 finally came out and I’ve been diving back into it. I’ve been learning Unity for a while now, and I feel that the quality of the program has significantly diminished over the years. The program is bloated, slow, and NOTHING seems to work out of the box.


Brand new, empty 2d project in Unity:1.23gb and ~22000 files.

Brand new, empty project in Godot4: 9.4kb and 12 files.


That is such a big difference.


I’ve been working through a pakt book: Godot Game Engine Projects as well as some online tutorials at the same time to make a little spacey-sci fi coin pickup game. I’m trying to get in there and really commit. We’ll see how it goes.


This week I finished reading “Ruination” by Anthony Reynolds and it was a blast. I didn’t know until after that it was set approximately 1000 years prior to the current League of Legends world. It was really fun seeing official backstory and origin of some of my favorite characters.


I didn’t write much of anything this week, but I did think about it quite a bit. I’m really struggling to determine what technology my world is using in the nano-project I’m going to start editing in earnest next month for camp nano. The question is how I want gravity to work. Do I want it to be properly physics based with gyroscoping ships generating artificial gravity, or do I want there to be some sort of “magic” gravity generation. The magic route is easier, but doesn’t make a lot of sense in real science.


Actually, There is theory that dark matter could eventually be used to generate gravity, but that still has to assume dark matter exists and that somehow it could be harnessed in such a way.


Goals for next week:


Honestly that may be too many items already! I can make big plans about doing all this stuff, but consistency is a problem for me. So we’ll keep it short for now and try to build the habit a little better.