Week 92: Sugar and Doodle Insights (Patreon)

Let me know what you think of 'Sugar' as the name of my game framework or if 'Sugar-32' sounds better, or if you have a better idea!

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This week was alright!

This week I finished the Doodle Insights #20 and published it and I worked on my game engine/framework/library thing! (let’s just say game framework for now)

The Doodle Insights #20 is finally here! It’s about this effect you can see on the gif above! It’s actually quite simple to implement and very fun to play with, and the write-up is there to help you with the implementation part!

Check it out!

Will there be a second write-up for January, as promised earlier this month? (I said I would do at least two write-ups every month) Well there just might be something! I actually have another‘Lost Write-Up’ that I wrote over two years ago! Although this one did get published, in the Picozine #4. I still think it’s worth editing and putting on the site! Coming this week! (unless I change my mind because it’s not as good as I remember :X)

I also said I would release at least one game every month. I was hoping to get my game framework in a somewhat usable state in time but didn’t manage it. So instead I’ll be jamming something out in 4-6 hours sometime this week, before the end of the month!

I am getting some progress on my game framework! For one thing, I’m finally able to show stuff on screen! It’s still quite rough but it works!

The reason it took so long is that I’m doing things in a pretty unconventional way. In-engine, my surfaces (the screen and eventually the sprite-sheets) are basically just buffers of index values, pointing to colors in a palette! (just like in Pico-8 and old game systems) I thought this would be easy enough to do in SDL 2 with the legacy SDL 1.2 API, but it seems this approach has been somewhat deprecated for a while now. Still, I managed to make it happen and it runs really well!

Now that I’m finally there, I’ll be working on an input system and a game loop system. I’m hopeful that these will be rather quick to make happen. Then I’ll have a whole bunch of systems to work on, among which a ‘sprite-sheet’ system and an audio system! When all those are in an acceptable state, (hopefully before mid-February) it should be ready for a quick jam game!

And by the way, I’m still torn on the name of this game framework, but for now it’s called Sugar! (cause you’ll make sweet stuff with it) (maybe to evolve in Sugar-[some number]? Sugar-32 maybe?)

Overall it’s been an ok week! Didn’t get as much done as I wanted on Sugar, but there has been a couple of breakthroughs that make it feel really promising now!

This week I’m finding back my Picozine write-up, then I make a game in a couple of hours and then there’ll be lots of things to do on Sugar!

Have a great week everyone!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG