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[Pineapple]

I've been picking up Godot and working on something new. If it goes well, and I can be lucky enough to maintain the time and energy to keep working on it, I'd like it to become my first commercial project. It'll be nice to have somewhere to document and discuss how it's going.

I'm starting to get pretty comfortable with Godot, but it was a really rough start. A few months ago I built a trivial 3D game in it and had such a bad experience doing so that I wrote it off entirely. But I ended up giving it a second chance. Though it does have its rough spots, once I got used to its editor UI quirks and dumped GDScript for C# I've been having a pretty okay time with it.

Here's what I have to show so far, after about a week of getting up to speed with Godot (and .NET which I've barely used before). It's the beginnings of a specialized map editor, which will be nicely tied in with the gameplay so that I can quickly iterate by switching between playtesting and live map editing. There's some important behind-the-scenes type code already written, e.g. for representing and rendering terrain meshes in an efficient way that is tailored to the art direction I plan for the game, but so far the UI elements pictured are all placeholders. My immediate todo items include implementing a mode for drawing quads into the world (pencil button) and then implementing a face selection mode (quad outline button) where those drawn quads can be selected and deselected using the mouse.

[Pineapple]

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[Pineapple]

So I took a little bit of a detour over the past few days.

In that earlier screenshot, I had made a custom Container class for Godot to lay out those square buttons on the left side. Godot has a built-in Container tool for laying out UI controls in a vertical line like that, but it's not big on adaptivity features. Specifically, I really wanted all the controls inside the bar to be scaled up to fit the width of the toolbar, whatever the width might happen to be, while still maintaining the square aspect ratio, and the built-in BoxContainer did not seem to be capable of this.

Recently I took my work on that custom container and fleshed it out to make it more generally usable, and I released it as an open source Godot plugin. So my custom Container works a lot like the built-in BoxContainer, but it has more customization features, including the option to size up controls to fit while maintaining their aspect ratio. I learned a whole lot more about how Godot's UI system works and how its addons work in the course of doing all this, so it feels like time well spent.

Here it is on GitHub: https://github.com/pineapplemachine/Godot-BoxAspectContainer

Here it is on the Godot asset library site: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/2518

Now I'm back onto the world editing code.

[Pineapple]

Been a while since I've had anything worthy of an update post, but I'm still working on this!

Initially I had sort of taken for granted that I'd be able to just make 3D models in Blender and drop them easily into Godot, but I've been spending a pretty good chunk of time so far just experimenting and troubleshooting and writing code to get an asset pipeline working. I have a fair bit of work to go still. I had set out with an idea in my head of what I wanted to do with art direction, that is firmly within the bounds of what is reasonable for me as a solo developer to manage within Godot, but what I had not accounted for was how uncooperative Blender and Godot's existing import tools would end up being. I am learning that if you want to do something that is even a tiny bit off the beaten path, you are going to have a rough time.

One of these days I would really like to take the time to build a piece of 3D modeling software that solves some serious technical and UX shortcomings I find in existing software. But for now, I guess I should probably focus on actually building a game, and save that project for if I should ever find myself with an abundance of free time.

[Pineapple]

With those prior frustrations mostly sorted out, through learning how to make use of Blender's Python API and realizing that Godot just goes and automagically imports extra UV layers as all the vertex attributes you're likely to need (so now I can use a script to stuff whatever data I want into UVs and then have easy access to it in shaders in Godot), I've moved on to actually making assets.

Though I've tinkered with Blender a lot over the years, though I've made loads of 3D art in the form of levels and environments for games (especially in Hammer), though I have a pretty firm grasp of all the concepts from graphics programming...

I never actually sat down to fully model, texture, and rig a non-trivial character model before. It's been an interesting learning experience.

Finally, though, I'm getting close to finishing my very first proper character model.

[michaelplzno]

this is a based giga brained image