GULL (#1GAM May 2017)

First devlog on itch.io!

Didn't know about these, but then I mostly use itch.io as a place to store work neatly. In fairness most of the games I upload contain their own devlog, so this probably won't be much new stuff.

I'm at the point now where every single month I notice the pattern: the first week/two weeks I feel super creative and try new things, like Blender3D modelling, voxel modelling, Godot Engine development, chickenwire sculpture...

Then suddenly it's the second half of the month and every day when I sit down to work on 'a personal project' (which is the only rule I set myself), I am thinking 'oh wow, what am I going to do for #1GAM this month?'.  Some months it's particularly awful, and one month's game is actually done in the grace period for the next. That's no good, although the magic of PICO-8 lets me get some pretty nice games done in as little as 90 minutes.

Anyway this month I had some real, legitimate inspiration for a game, but in my head it will have to be 3D, so it couldn't reasonably happen in PICO-8. I tried implementing it in 2D, but got distracted and started half-heartedly investigating 'bad 3D' (basically a DOOM-looking way of rendering sprites bigger/smaller based on how close you are). It didn't go anywhere, and I ended up with not much to do. So I decided to animate a bird flapping its wings. Probably should have done more than two frames, now that I think about it, but oh well.

Main technical achievement in this one was actually getting some out of a scrolling background without manually rendering every sprite. Instead I created 'chunks' of 128*40 pixels (16*5 sprites/tiles), and used multiple MAP calls to render them each frame. This seems kind of rough on the framerate, not sure why, since MAP is normally fine at rendering the whole screen worth of background. Maybe calling it multiple times isn't expected. Anyway, a 'random' new one of 6 is spawned each time one scrolls off the screen, and the old one is deleted. Problem with this is the way I put it together, I only had room to draw 6 chunks. There is definitely a neater way to map them, but I was just working with vertical space here because it was easier to make the MAP Y value {chunk}*5.

Two artistic achievements: music that I am _okay_ with, not sick of immediately. And a bunch of minimalist world tiles that I'm really quite pleased with. So not bad at all there.

I guess maybe see you another time if you are reading this, or maybe not. I certainly wrote more than I expected to here, so I might do another!

G'luck.