I missed yesterday. After working some more, I planned to take a quick break. I laid back and closed my eyes to get my thoughts together for around 30 seconds. Suddenly, that 30 seconds turned into 8 or so hours. It happens, but there’s nothing to do but attempt to get back on track. 

As I sit down and go over the stuff I wrote down in the GDD the day before, I began to get an appreciation of how much it helps to have your thoughts in order before you even begin a session of game dev. Having something that needs to get done in a bullet point order assists in fighting the blank canvas feeling. There’s no need to put too much thought into what the plan is: I already mapped it out, and now it's ready for execution. 

I cannot emphasize enough how big a boon preparation is. Diving into stuff without a plan is a bit of an immature way to approach a project. And again, I have to thank my day job for teaching me to have the discipline of taking this approach to not only game dev, but a lot of other stuff I do in life. 

Yesterday, I wanted to adjust the enemy paddle bot’s AI a bit. So far, it was way too easy to beat. I considered looking into completely different methods of getting it to bounce the ball back, but without it looking too robotic, and I guess that is sort of ironic since they are robots in the story. So there were some questions I asked myself. Should I possibly make the ball faster? Or even adjust the movement speed of the paddles? The enemy currently has a random pooling time that determines when it’s going to move left or right when near the ball. Should I alter that?

The answer ended up being all of the above. I was a bit shocked to see that tweaking the numbers a bit made it a ton better and I actually think that it is currently perfect. It doesn’t just follow the ball and prevent victory from being possible, but it also still gives me a challenge. I’m already having a ton of fun playing against and trash-talking a CPU paddle, and this is still at a stage where everything is either a rectangle or circle. I’m now really hyped to see it with the proper assets, animations, cutscenes, and sounds. 

But as usual, this achievement marked the start of a new challenge to overcome. If anyone thinks of a game, they think of the game mechanics, the music, the art, and some other things. One thing that’s overlooked by me is the GUI, more specifically, the menus, and the way one level changes to another. In Godot, I believe this is mainly done through scenes. 

I’m not going to lie here, scene handling seems far from the most exciting thing to work on and I have been putting it off for a while, but with the prototype of the gameplay loop so close to done, I knew that I needed to have another scene so I can test something else out. I was about to just create one and run it through the game editor, but I saw an opportunity to dip my toes in creating a menu, one that will have a button for starting the main game and another for starting a new testing environment that I aim to set up tomorrow. 

Thus, I embarked on the fourth main thing a game dev does that I forgot to mention the other day: research. Research is a bit of a difficult thing for me. I was never a good student, and as a visual learner, trying to learn things through text alone especially defeats my efforts to become skilled in a specific topic. I unconsciously don’t try to see the big picture of the topic I’m learning, only the answer to my very specific predicament. I mindlessly follow YouTube tutorials, only to have a project that looks like theirs but fails to teach me how it actually works and does not prepare me for using it in my project. I try to read the documentation and immediately, I begin to get sleepy. This is probably precisely what got me to bed early yesterday. I had a round with research, and research knocked me out. 

Tonight, I had a go at round 2, and I’m proud to say, I came out victorious. I have some bruises here and there, but also have a perfectly functional menu with the 2 buttons I wanted. And again, the purpose of this project is to learn how to use Godot and what the best practices are for different problems in Godot. Fortunately, I’m learning a good bit and it’s an awesome sensation to feel yourself getting better at something. It’s cool to recognize when stuff that would stump me for days can now be situated in less than an hour. Before, I was avoiding scenes, but after tackling the subject, it doesn’t scare me as much anymore, and I’ll only get better at it. 

Getting into menu design was not this early in the plan. However, sometimes new considerations appear as I work my way through a task. And I adjust the GDD accordingly whenever I receive new knowledge about how stuff is done. I will say this, Singletons still confuse me a bit. I thought they would appear at the very root of the entire project, but from the testing I did and the errors I fought my way through, they seem to only inhabit the root of a scene that it's created in. I want to use a Singleton to share information about the ball’s position between both paddles and that’s the next thing for me to work on before I move on to the next set of features. 

But even before that, I want to look more into organizing my scenes. So far, they are all in the same folder, which doesn’t all seem good in the long term. Moving them to another folder breaks the game. Surely there’s a way in Godot to put scenes in subfolders. I guess tomorrow will be another round of research. I’m looking forward to knowing it, but not struggling with finding information to know it.

Another thing I want to do tomorrow is draw another character, preferably a human since the robots will be recolors of the ping/pong bot. I want to do this because I don’t want to get rusty with the tiny sliver of skill I have in the art. I already have a loose description of the character in my head. Just got to get that information out of this thick skull of mine and onto a notebook or something. 

As requested the other day, here is the link to the Game Design Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dIsVz_oMatPe6X3Qx_-YJjNvSuhOiakORtwARdXtI9Q/edit?usp=sharing

Note, that it's not the live one that I work on. I don’t want people to see me work on it irl. I get stage fright ;-;. What I want to do is upload an updated version of it every Friday. 

At last, I get to go to bed. For anyone reading, have a nice day.