Still here

Hello! It’s a new week. It’s great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining. Let’s chit chat about what’s new and all that.

In some ways last week was uneventful. Erika was out of town Thursday - Sunday, getting back very late on Sunday night / Monday morning. For that reason, there was no weekly movie night. I had no other plans, so it was basically just me and the pets. I did a lot of really long walks with Podo. He and I walked ~6 miles together on Saturday, and then walked another 6 miles on Sunday.

I find that when Erika is out of town, I tend to do these long walks with Podo. It’s like, Erika is temporarily away from the pack, so now me and Podo have to make sure we hang out together a lot. I always think of our pack as an atom - me, Erika and Podo are the nucleus of the atom, while Pancake is the electron of the atom. Pancake is vital to our overall stability, but she’s in a distinctly different part of the atom than the trio of me Podo and Erika who all seem to be endlessly hanging out together and never just vibing up on a high shelf happily alone.

Erika is back as of earlier today, so we’re returning to normalcy now. It feels like I am ready for a good week.

Diving into some of the stats for last week, first check out the weight loss chart. Getting completely off of processed food is starting to have an impact. I am feeling healthier. I feel like I am eating in a sustainable way. I am not pushing myself, the whole food eating is starting to become a lifestyle. I have chicken defrosting in the fridge right now for tonight’s dinner. I’m excited about it.

The exercise table looks good enough to me right now. A couple runs, and a ton of weekend walking with Podo.

It was another great week of game development. Here’s the data:

So much is happening in game development right now. Recently I have been adding some depth to different areas. I implemented a health bar for our player. You can see the health bar being depleted here, followed by a starter-death animation:

So the new addition in the video above is the four hearts representing the player’s health. In Godot, the hearts are their own CanvasLayer being drawn independently from the rest of the scene. When the player moves, the background moves, but the hearts of health stay fixed in the upper-left corner. The hearts also deplete one-by-one as you take damage.

As for the player, there’s some new things happening here as well. The player flashes red when taking damage, and eventually returns back to the normal color. This is currently my solution for providing a visual bit of feedback that you’ve taken damage, but I am not totally in love with it. I think it does need to eventually look a bit better. This is part of the give-and-take of working on the game though, is the red flash good enough for right now? I think it is.

The player also bounces backward upon taking damage, and goes into an animation where they are ducking and holding their head. Things about this could also be better. Since I originally took that video I’ve toned down the bounce-back. It’s a bit gentler now. I already had an animation of the main character ducking, since initially you could press down to duck (I have since removed that functionality. Who needs ducking.) But yeah since I had the animation I was like let’s use that for now to show taking damage. Again, I think it’s good enough for now but also very improvable.

As it is in classic games, if you are looking to the left when you take damage, the main character will instead bounce backward to the right. During the bounce back, you cannot move the character at all; your inputs are being ignored in the code while the main character is in the process of taking damage.

Also since taking that video, the Shadowy Steve enemy is now animated while idle. It basically just looks like it’s breathing. I don’t want to get another video, though.

After those changes, I started implementing a textbox system. Here’s where that’s at:

Thus far I can get the textbox to shop up and draw a customized message. In the video above, the main character getting halfway across the screen is what triggers the textbox. This is a branch of code that is going to split off into a bunch of directions in the coming weeks. What is now a textbox really needs to be an entire system that is capable of taking control away from the player and causing a scene with textboxes to play out. It will have to branch to the side to become textboxes that appear when you engage with something. It will eventually need to take user input. I have some experience working on textboxes in my jrpg project, so some of this is familiar to me. Building as much of this as I can is probably the goal of this week.

I am enjoying game development right now.

I did some reflecting on speedrunning this weekend. I am not sure if I actually figured anything out about it, but I did reflect on it.

Observation 1: I have not streamed since September 4. It is now November 17. That’s an especially long time when I look at how close I am to being able to live stream Mega Man 4 runs: I am nowhere close.

Observation 2: I am having a lot of trouble actually learning Mega Man 4. There’s a motivational science behind your own speedrun learning, and I think I need a strategy tweak with Mega Man 4.

My total practice hours for Mega Man 4 aren’t great, and I think part of that is that learning the game has not been particularly gratifying. I’ve spent weeks putting a few hours against the first level of the game, and am still not performing it on par with the world record.

Some games are simpler to learn than others. For example, in Adventure Island 3, the most common basic movement is just moving to the right, which you do at a consistent speed. There’s no ambiguity in how to traverse a stretch of land - you just run. For this reason, it’s somewhat simple to watch the world record, and then, after some work, be able to perfectly replicate the strategy.

In Mega Man 4, traversing left to right is more complicated, because sliding is the fastest way to travel. This opens up a can of worms. You want to slide as much as possible, but you also need to try and have slides line up well for the obstacles that are immediately ahead of you. Now each flat terrain is some unique combination of slides of varying lengths. All the tiny moments you save perfecting the slides may then compile and change something about what’s happening downstream of these moments.

This changes how the learning process goes. When I learned Adventure Island 3, and Felix the Cat, I learned the world record route and could reasonably replicate it fairly quickly. With Mega Man 4, I cannot reasonably replicate everything I am seeing. In some cases, this is even after multiple hours practicing one small section. The run has a high level of precision and the top runners are really good.

This in turn forces me to choose some lower level of performance to shoot for during my initial learning. I am seeing myself grapple with that. I want to keep pushing to learn the WR strats, but at the same time my learning does feel like it’s spinning its wheels. Drawing from my own experiences, I think that I probably need to lower my bar for Mega Man 4 performance, and start prioritizing live streaming my first Mega Man 4 run. I need to force myself to accept defeat in certain areas, and make sure I am not putting myself at risk of giving up on this project.

With that, my goal for this week is to keep chipping away at Mega Man 4, but to do so with more emphasis on progressing through the game and less on staying on pace with the world record. I still don’t feel super motivated even after this analysis but maybe I feel more clarity. I don’t know. Let’s just make sure to evaluate again this time next week.

Anyway that’s the latest on the stuff I am trying to keep tracking week to week. This weekend I found this farmer’s Youtube channel who posts videos about his herding dogs. Definitely recommended.

I want to be as good at my job as these two pups.

That’s it for me today. I hope y’all are ready for a great week. I will try and check in during the week like usual. Go forth - I believe in you.