Starting on a new journey

Today marks a new “time around the mountain” for me. I've been wanting to focus on a few things like making games with Godot as well as learning to make my own “Apps” in the engine. Today I started (re) learning Godot in earnest to begin my new “Journey”. I'm going to stay hyperfocused on Godot – learning how to create some games that I've always wanted to build, as well as explore how Godot can be used to make game making tools — to blur the line between “App” and “Game”.

Right now I'm starting out looking at the stable version's documentation and re-making the “sample” game to get myself back in the right frame of mind.

This day also sees me starting to blog again – perchance I will hit beyond a 2-day streak. I've decided to stick with Write.as as they have always been great for blogging – plus I have a lifetime membership I should be using.

The one problem with their tool is there's no preview for the markdown, so I'm using the amazing StackEdit tool ( link below ) which does do much as a Markdown editor.

I've waffled back and forth between using HTML/CSS/JS as an authoring tool and other tools like GDevelop and Godot. Godot gives me everything I can want and need and I can create things that run on the web, windows, mac, etc. and it's totally free and open source. And I want to support that.

Today while starting on the docs, I was wondering how on earth apps that use Godot like RPG in a box as their “engine” actually create some kind of editor that outputs games. Alfred Baudisch was so kind to introduce me to the idea behind Resources in Godot . I knew all about Nodes, Scenes, and Scripts which are super powerful concepts in that engine, but I had no idea about Resources.

He shared with me the mind blowing concept that you don't really try to compile some kind of 'game' from your own Godot-based tool, instead you essentially create two engines. One engine is the 'player' kinda like the Flash runtime. That has all the capabilities you want in the final output. So, you build that player which then takes in Resources and 'runs' them. The second engine is the editor you create in Godot which lets you mess around with the types of data you want to manipulate ( say a storytelling engine ) and it's 'output' are packed Resources that the other 'player' engine consumes. Brilliant!

This might seem obvious to some folks, but to me it's a watershed moment. I now know how to begin building my game tools using just the capabilities that Godot gives me. Heck, I could even go crazy and give my 'player' engine the ability to accept plugins. How Meta is that?

Anyway, it all centers on learning Godot. And building cool stuff with it.

In addition to this, I've been looking at how could I make a back end for my tools – so folks could log in , save things, keep settings, etc. I'm really happy with a project called SupaBase, which can handle Auth, user accounts, and other database stuff. It even does realtime things.

Finally, I'm getting to tie all my skills together into one set of code and projects.

With all the darkness going on in the world right now, this has shined a bit of light into my life, and renewed my drive to keep coding and learning.

I'm also spending some time looking at solo RPG's like Apothecaria and how I might be able to create my own ( again in Godot! )

On to cool stuff!

Written with StackEdit.