April 18th, 12:30 P.M. EST- It's become increasingly clear to me that that I won't be able to make the deadline for April. What I am attributing it to:
-My inexperience with Application Design
- My underestimation with how long certain facets of my idea would take to implement programatically
-SCOPE. My idea was interesting, but too complicated for my current skills
-Time Management: I am a cartoonist and animator by trade, and my insistence on developing an interesting visual style deprived me of the time that I needed to learn how to program.
I'm going to change focus. My focus from here on will be on learning the tools I need to use to create the games that I want. I WILL NOT be focusing on making a certain type of game, but I will be adding figurative notches to my game development belt.
Another thing I'll be changing is the tool that I am using. I've been learning Java and LibGDX for about 3 years now, and while I am grateful to the LibGDX team( looking at you, Mario) for making it easier to learn the language and use it for game development, I am beginning to realize now that there are tools out there that make your workflow much more efficient.
I am an artist by trade, and I don't plan to stop learning general programming any time soon. That having been said, I'm going to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and use tools created by those who have more skill in programming than I.
From now on, I will be developing with a tool known as the Godot Engine, an open-source 2D/3D engine that exports to PC, Mac, Linux, Android, and HTML5. Hopefully I'll be able to post on the forum more frequently. I am also rethinking my Devlog format. I will edit the original post with the change once I've come up with a decent plan for how I am to tackle my posts.
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Week of Monday, April 18th
✓PRIMARY GOAL: Sprite that moves in 8 cardinal directions and responds to player input.
✓SECONDARY GOAL: Applying Acceleration and Deceleration forces to Sprite.
April 19, 12:32 P.M EST -
https://zippy.gfycat.com/LastingGrimyBongo.webm
Aaaaand, done.
This one was pretty easy to do. I'm going to start messing around with acceleration and deceleration forces now.
Oh, and by the way, that counter below my sprite is my FPS counter. Accidently created a child node to the sprite because I don't know how scenes in the Godot engines work. Will try to fix that too. =P
April 22, 11:45P.M EST -
https://zippy.gfycat.com/GrizzledActualDromaeosaur.webm
Got acceleration forces and deceleration forces to work. Somewhat. It's not tight, but it's progress. I also moved the FPS counter to the corner. I now have a better idea for how scenes and nodes work.
I'm going to start posting the gfycat links, because they're higher quality than the gifs.