So my parental leave have officially started. I don’t know how it will all play out, but I think it may be possible for me to squeeze in a few dev and create hours in between the household choirs and taking care of my child in the coming months. So I looked at my projects, thought about which one to pick up and landed on this one.

My first steps have been to understand the code I made, two years ago(?!). Whoa, makes sense but that’s some while ago. Well, I found that I had bundled object hierarchies in a weird way where the player is part of a room in the generated world. So first action has been to unbundle and restructure the core game components, as well as hadling various resolutions. Fun anyway!

It’s been a while since my last update but there has been progress. A friend who is looking for something to do this summer is considering doing a bit of game development. We had some drinks and pitched ideas to each other, then we worked a bit on our projects. He is getting into Famitracker and I made an avatar for the player in S&D. I have been approaching some friends regarding desiging music and audio for the game, since I’m not very skilled at this myself, however if he has the time I think some 8-bit chiptune could fit the game.

After that session I also made some new dice for the game, d1 to d6. I tried using Blender but I still can’t get my head around its interface. After a die or two I went back to my old favorite, SketchUp. I have tried TinkerCAD and 123D as well, but online tools just aren’t that reliable and 123D still seems like a poor man’s SketchUp to me.

Another week, another game dev Friday. I have worked a bit more on the dungeon generation both in terms of implementation and design. The idea is to be able to generate a basic dungeon and then add a few special places with their own generated shapes and content. The image above shows a generated dungeon and the UI surrounding the part, a room, visible to the player. Dice for generating content of the rooms, thrown as they are entered, are also placed on the map.

I have had a good, solid dev run these days. First there was a swedish holiday on Thursday, then there was my 20% off Friday and finally the weekend. Coincidentally, the weather was great on all of these days, so I could juggle coding with sangria and picnics in the nearby park.

Most of my work has gone into at well needed design and content update of this dev blog, now it is at least not as hopeless as it was before. Nevertheless, I did manage to squeeze a few hours into Slice and Dice. These hours went into a few fixes to the environment generation of the maps. I managed to solve a bug with the tiling, make the storage of spritesheets more efficient, and also experiment with a new layer of environment. Coming up next are in-game instructions and some interaction and ui design.

So I haven’t been writing much here for awhile. However, a lot have happened since my last post. Most importantly I have finally decided to go down in work hours to 80%, so that I can have one extra day per week for my own projects. The plan is to use Fridays as my personal day since it connects nicely to the weekend. So I have been doing that for about a month and it’s great, though the decrease in salary is notable… but it’s an investment.

So the new project is called Slice and Dice. It’s a dungeon crawler in where I work with a strong theme of dice, exploring the properties of these classical game tokens. As a bonus I also get to return to procedurally generated worlds, something I started playing with back 2007 with the overly ambitious project which I only named “Browser game” or “World”. So, all in all, things are great. : )