So, what's Ru been up to lately, anyway? (Patreon)

(TL;DR - just skip to the bottom you'll see it, though it might take a bit to load)

You may have noticed there hasn't been a tremendous amount of art coming from me lately. As always, this means I'm working on something in the background. Unfortunately, this time around it's honestly probably not something most of you will be terribly interested in, but I feel like you might at least be curious to hear what it is if not the nitty gritty details, so I'ma jump into short overview of what I've been doing. 

I recently watched a youtube video wherein the creator described having a creative idea as being "poison". There's poison inside you and in order to get it out, you have to make the thing. This really resonated with me because that really can be what it feels like sometimes. When I get an idea that really demands exploration it can kind of eat away at my soul until I finally give in and start at least tinkering with it. 

My current poison is a game idea that's been eating away at my mind for years. Nobody else seems to be making it, at least not exactly how I'd want, and the poison doesn't seem to be leaving my system on it's own, so I finally had to give in and start tinkering with this idea. Long time followers may remember I've tinkered around with game dev before, but I never made it particularly far, bouncing off after only a few days usually. But this time it really seems to be sticking. 

Unity recently decided to become evil right around the time I was really getting eager to dive back into exploring game programming so I decided to give this other game engine I've been hearing about called Godot a try, and it really seems to be gelling with me in a way Unity never did. I had so little experience with Unity that it was easy to drop and start picking up the new engine. I just started fiddling around, seeing if it would catch my interest or if I'd get bored after a day or two. 

I started by learning how to spawn a cube into the world. Figured out how to scale it randomly, and turn a couple of cubes into a "room". Once you can make a room, it's not terribly hard to string a bunch of rooms together into a "dungeon" of sorts. Worked out how to make a minimap out of the dungeon. Then figured out how to import a blender model into Godot and get it moving around.

From there I started fiddling with an inventory system and... that's honestly where most of the last month went. An RPG inventory system (that's what I'd like to make, and ARPG of sorts) has a lot going on under the hood that you don't even think about while using it, and it's tied into so many other systems that it took me a long time to wrap my head around things. It's worth remembering I'm -not- a programmer, so I'm working out both a programming language (and good programming practices generally) and how to use Godot at the same time and it's a lot so progress is slow, hah. But after a few weeks of bashing my head against stuff I finally had an inventory system that was mostly up and running. But I didn't understand it very well so I tore it down and built it again, and now it's finally in a place where it's working well and I know how it works.  

Got all the inventory basics in place; stackable consuable items, equipment that doesn't stack and can only be equipped into it's proper slot (updating the model's animations in the process depending on the weapon), a hotbar that allows for using consumable items and properly applying their effect, all items can be dropped into the world and picked up from the world, going automatically into the inventory.  It... doesn't sound like a lot when you say it like that, because like, yeah that's how an inventory works. But it's a lot of cases and situations to figure out as someone who has no clue what they're doing. 

And that's honestly kind of where we are today- I have a non-game with some randomly generated empty rooms and a decently functional inventory/item system. But it's an important starting point because in this kind of game, all roads lead to the inventory, you can't do a lot without it. Half the point is getting that shower of loot after killing things. :P

It's not a lot of progress for a month and bit-ish, a skilled developer could probably whip this up in a few days, but remember I'm learning as I go. Programming, as it turns out, is hard for a non programmer. 

Anyway, that's what I've been up to. Is there enough of this poison in me to actually turn this into any kind of actual real game? I don't know. It may dry up after a few weeks. But it's still pretty strong right now, I keep imagining all the cool creatures I'd get to make and all the cool combat animations I could play with in the progress of making this thing, it seems fun. We'll see what happens. I make no promises. 

All that is to say, here's my kobold holding a bigass sword and doing some front handsprings as I play around with the dodge mechanic I just slipped into the movement controls. 

I pretty much allowed myself to just indulge entirely in this current interest for all of February, but don't worry, I don't intend for this to become all I do going forward. At least not yet. I'll try to wean myself back into making smut for you all this month, been dipping into the flat colour commissions again to warm myself back into making art, and I've got a few little animation ideas kicking around my head I might whip up soon!  Should have some goodies for you in the near future. But I imagine I'll definitely continue dipping into this after work and see where it goes.