triptych

Building fun experiences for the web

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Vacation Goals

After today, I'm off on vacation for almost a week. I get to go to #campusmoviefest with my daughter, who is showing a few short films she has created. I'm super excited for her, and hopeful she can make connections with great folks there.

As for me, I've just got a new laptop, I've primed it with things like Godot Engine, GDevelop, Android Studio, and Visual Studio Code ( as well as Steam and Gog ). I've got a few things I'd like to do for myself whilst accompanying my daughter including:

  • Finish reading the Rust Book ( also Rust and Webassembly as well as Rust Async — I just learned that those books were created using mdbook ... learned something new today already!
  • Finish reading Godot docs.
  • Work on #ittybittyrpg in Godot. Starting from scratch. Will iterate like crazy. I've learned a lot about Godot this past year, and it makes me want to use Godot to build my own tool. Get a splash screen and stub out the editor and view screens. Get it to output a simple HTML file.
  • Work on #DungeonAfternoon in GDevelop — get a simple guy walking around a map. Level 0.

That's a lot, right? Well I hope to stay super busy. And maybe play some of my immense backlog of PC games.

I just discovered GDevelop, though I think I have seen this engine in the past in earlier versions and thought “It's not fully baked, I'll check it out later” only to forget about it until I was reminded of it a few weeks ago. It's like Construct 2 and other “action sheet” kinda game makers where you don't exactly code , more like you set up listeners for certain events, then manipulate pre-built objects to make a game.

GDevelop is essentially a hybrid app that has been written in C++ but gradually ported over to ReactJS as well as Webassembly. Check out this very interesting slide show from the author that talks about the app's transformation.

For me, I've been trying to build a game making tool for over a year now, and I've been learning a lot about how to make an app. Godot Engine is an excellent tool for making games, both 2D and 3D and it even has enough functionality to create other kinds of apps.

I'm even working on a book about making apps in Godot, but more on that later. Today is all about GDevelop.

I decided to try out one of the tutorials to see how complex and workable creating a simple game in GDevelop would be, and I have to say it was pretty good.

If you want to skip to the playing part of this – check out my demo game over at itch.io.

Essentially I implemented this demo. It was pretty straightforward, with only a few glitches. I actually found a bug in the app, filed an issue, and got a response all in the space of 30 mins.

Apparently GDevelop is being maintained by a single person, in their spare time. It's looking pretty good for a side project, but to be honest I think they need to allow more folks to contribute.

It seems to be actively developed, with some exciting features just a few months ago added. I like where the app is going, and I plan on trying to create a real game in it this year.

My goals for my time at Terminus / Campus Movie Fest are to make progress on #ittybittyrpg and to get a basic walk around demo for Dungeon Afternoon working in GDevelop. I might even write some tutorials on my Andreww.xyz home page.

So, if you are a “non coder” or are looking for an app that has a nice framework to build a game within – that is open source and free – give GDevelop a try.

Today I got a new laptop. It's small, but fast, and I can do so much more with this one. It's an HP Pavilion x360 with a tablet mode. It's small, but it's perfect for my uses. Look for more code. More blog posts. More gamedev. More everything. Woot!

I've been seeing Dev.to around a lot lately. I've been posting a bit there too as well! I just discovered that Dev.to can “repost” from your own site's RSS feed ( Mine is here if you want to subscribe. Write.as also can auto post to Mastodon Follow me there either at this blog —> @triptych@write.as or my own account —> @triptych@mastodon.social .

This is really powerful. RSS has been around forever, and while Google doesn't like it any more (hard to serve ads in a feed) the rest of the web can and should still use it! I'm glad sites like Dev.to are embracing this and allowing all of us greater freedom.

I post a daily “dev blog” which I will be re-post to Dev.to now for now on!

Write.as even auto posts this to Twitter. So really, if you create a Write.as account, you can make it your “master editor” for all your social posts.

Andy Bell created a great starter kit for 11ty called Hylia , and I'm over the moon about it. I love 11ty and probably will use it for many new static sites to come. Netlify is grand and you should use it for everything as well. The “Deploy to Netlify” button is simply brilliant. It gets you up and running in seconds and allows you to dive into the code shortly after that. It even has a style guide .

Here's the tweet:

Why is Hylia cool? Because it is another way to break free from the social network black holes of Facebook, Twitter, Medium, and Instagram. It's time to take back the web, get your own site up and running, and graduate from just posting cat pictures on a social network. This will help you take that step and join the free web that was the original way the web was supposed to work. Not inside a single domain that seeks to use your private information to sell you things and make you depressed.

So, I highly recommend you watch the video, because it tells you how to set up a Wordpress style CMS with Netlify which, by the way is just BRILLANT!.

Today I have to work on “Compliance Training”, but then I'm going to do some fun coding with Tracery.

My life has consisted of working at my day job during Hack Week, working on a browser plugin. Part of the functionality is very similar to this Torus Demo . Torus is this event driven framework by @thesephist. It's pretty cool and has good documentation for such a new project.

At night I'm also getting into GDevelop which is kinda like what Godot would be if it was written in React and used Event Sheets. It's free, open source, and works pretty well.

I'm also playing Persona Three Portable, which is simply an amazingly well made game.

If you want to check out the Torus Demo, I embedded it here for convenience.

So, I'm at the beginning of a game I'm calling Dungeon Afternoon. It started with the idea of an RPG meets Neko Atsume. Then the idea of having little tea party style events you throw with multiplayer aspects.

Now, I have a bit more of the story fleshed out. You are a failed Dark Lord. The three heroes have defeated you and gave you one alternative to death. You must serve 10 years of community service and rebuild the lands you devastated.

You get to populate dungeons, wastelands, forests, and other areas. The local creatures are wary of you, and your own minions hate you. How will you succeed?

I've been thinking about how I want to move forward with #ittybittyrpg as my desire to create content for the web competes with the desire to make things in #godotengine. I was referred to another engine called GDevelop which is a React based game engine kind like Construct or Stencyl and I saw in it the potential to use something a bit better than just vanilla JS for my project. I will spend some time to get familiar with it, as it checks all the checkboxes of free, open source, extensible, and built on the web.

So much has happened since I last wrote here, but I want to maintain a routine of posting here. I've created my own site (still 'under construction') at andreww.xyz as well as a few new sites like godotdepot and Build on the web .

Creating my own site led me to wonder if I should continue posting daily dev blogs here, but I realized that I can use this as my sort of daily “diary” and post more substantial articles and posts on my own site.

I'm also in the process of moving my Medium posts about Godot to my own blog as well. Netlify, Gitlab, and Hugo are great resources.

I also am thinking about a new game called Dungeon Afternoon where you create dungeons and monsters come to visit or stick around to help you.

I also played a lot with FireBase today, and I must say it's pretty awesome.

I'm back from vacation, and ready to get moving on the rest of this year. Lots of things to do, and I'm focused on #godotengine as well as building my websites for the year.

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