November 7: Unexpected Complications

Hey, so it's been a while, and a lot has happened. The TLDR of it is that things suddenly got way too busy to really work on learning game dev for a time, and may still be kind of busy until at most Feburary or March, but I WILL start to at least try to continue with that game dev tutorial I was following along with until all this happened.

To get into more detail, a family member had a family emergency in late July, and me and my brother helped care for them. Unfortunately, they passed in mid September. Worse, we were living with them, and they owned the house, so now we need to move out by the end of the year (don't worry, I already have a plan for where I'm going to live). All this means that I've been way to busy to really work on anything other than cleaning out the house and packing everything up ahead of time, but now I'm finally feeling up to continuing the game development tutorial I mentioned in the last post.

While cleaning the house though, I actually found a ton of me and my brother's old Pokemon and Yugioh cards. We were pretty into both when we were kids, and I didn't realise the extent we were into them until I stumbled across them when cleaning out the basement a few weeks ago. There has to be over 2000 individual cards, it's insane, and I've found cards of up to gen 3 Pokemon. I've been working on compiling just what Pokemon cards we have, which editions, what condition they're in, and so on so I can start to sell the ones that are worth selling, while I'm going to give the Yugioh cards to my brother since he wants to keep them. The spreadsheet I've been compiling everything currently has 1844 individual cards on it.

Errorgrove Isle Updates

In the meantime, though, I HAVE been still working on my dream game, Errorgrove Isle's GDD and have even come up with a few new mechanics and fleshed out a couple more characters. Not only that, but going through those Pokemon cards actually inspired me and gave me an idea for a side game set in Errorgrove Isle's universe that's basically an in-universe licensed game for an in-universe card game that's a deckbuilder roguelike with many mechanics inspired by other trading card games, even including a couple of lesser-known mechanics (examples of inspirations being Yugioh, Pokemon, MTG, and more).

I also had the idea to ALSO have another of my game ideas I was going to make before Errogrove Isle be set in Errorgrove Isle's universe (a horror-exploration game set in an in-universe dead interactive chatroom game that's inspired by Basilisk 2000 and IRL dead interactive chatroom games like Activeworlds). I'm planning on actually having each game reference the other two games (for example, for that horror-exploration game, Errorgrove Isle's player character, Milo, appears as a semi-major character, and the game also mentions the in-universe card game the deckbuilder roguelike is "based" on at one point in one of the worlds the player can explore).

Game Development Updates

As for how the tutorial game I'm making had been going before all this happened, I've not only been following the tutorial itself, but I've also been reading the comments on the videos for any tweaks that people made to the code, and actually found quite a few for making the code more streamlined. Some examples of tweaks I made are:

I tweaked how the player's sprite was animated after a comment pointed out a better way of doing it using an AnimatedSprite2D node instead of the semi-janky way the tutorial did it (which was using a basic Sprite2D node and handling the animation entirely through the code).
I added comments to nearly every line of code so I can better understand what does what.

I also ended up taking a bit of a detour to learn how Documentation Comments work in GDScript so I can add descriptions to all @export variables. I actually had trouble looking up how to actually add line breaks to Documentation Comments and it ended up taking half an hour until I finally worded my search right to get a search result for Godot's documentation for Documentation Comments (Google kept giving me results for adding line breaks to rich text labels or normal comments, neither of which apply to Documentation Comments). The good news is that now I can better document everything the game's code does.

I read the comments of part 5, which actually included an alternate method for picking a random offscreen position for the enemy spawner that did it using a function with only 4 lines of code (it was originally 5 lines, but a reply offered a tweak that brought it down to 4). I decided to go with that instead of the version in the video (though I DID also code in the tutorial's version of the code too for documentation, as well as a second version that was also in the comments that also had a few things that I felt could be important to know).
The comments of part 6 mentioned that it would be more efficient and organised to make each attack's code self-contained instead of the spawning and aiming code being tied to the player's script. I instead made a "handler" object for each attack that gets spawned and attached to the player and that spawns and handles each attack.

All in all, it's been going really well, and I've been enjoying it a LOT more than my previous attempt last year (having a tutorial that actually applies to the dang Godot version I'm using helps). I'm really looking forward to following the rest of the tutorial, whenever I'll have the oppurtunity to.

Anyway, I'm honestly not entirely sure when exactly I'll have an oppurtunity to really start working on learning game development again. I'll TRY to do it when I have free time (assuming i have enough free time to really be able to), but with my current plans so far, I should definately be able to continue learning game dev in earnest again by mid-Feburary at the absolute latest. I may or may not make another update before then, but my next update's probably going to be either in Feburary, or if something happens that warrants another update.