Hey friends! I’m a bit low and slow today, so I’ll keep it brief. In this week’s newsletter, I’ll talk a bit about how I’m feeling and some personal, work, and hobby-related struggles this last week.

How Am I Doing?

I’m tired and drained, but good. As I said in last week’s newsletter, I had a pretty social week, and this past week was no different. I think I went into the negative with my social battery and am currently feeling the repercussions of it. What does that look like? Well, I have a hard time holding a conversation because I can’t find the words, or I’m overthinking a subject before posing it. I can’t really hold onto my usual public persona either, which is this more bombastic, jocular version of myself. Instead, I just slink away into a corner and try to process or shut out stimuli as best as I can. It’s tiring to be around people, and I want to pull a blanket over my head and be left alone for a couple of weeks.

I’m not officially diagnosed on the spectrum or anything, but it’s days like these that I’m pretty sure I got something haha. Despite all that, I’m enjoying the early spring weather and working on Bibidi. The game is coming along great, and I get compliments often on how it’s really starting to shape up.

What Am I Doing?

For the past week, I’ve been messing about with encrypting our Bibidi builds, so you can’t just reverse engineer the whole project in under a minute. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what happened to Slay the Spire 2 in the very same week, the biggest game in our genre that just launched into early access. People immediately decompiled the game and were able to browse through all the assets and source code as they saw fit.

Now, we don’t really care that people can do that to Bibidi. We don’t really care about pirating. If you find a free version of a build flying around on the internet somewhere so you don’t have to pay, good on you! What we do care about, however, is people selling illegitimate copies of Bibidi that might be loaded with malware or some bullshit crypto scam or something. At the very least, we want to provide the minimum amount of friction to prevent that kind of thing.

It’s not necessarily a very complex process to get encryption up and running, but man, it took me days of canoodling, and I hated every step of it. Just to rant a bit about the pain I went through:

• I tried to follow the Godot official docs for a cross compilation command line tool and ran into all sort of errors that I couldn’t find anything about on the internet.
• So I followed the recommended route for Windows instead, which required me to install a specific version of Visual Studio I couldn’t bloody find anywhere.
• After a day managed to get to the point where I could build Windows export templates and make an encrypted build for Windows alone.
• I tried the same thing for macOS. It requires Xcode. I installed Xcode.
• It needs a newer version of Xcode. It’s not supported on my macOS version.
• I try to update my macOS version to the minimum required for that version of Xcode. It’s not officially supported on my hardware.
• I had to back up my whole laptop, use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to make a boot install to unofficially install the newer unsupported macOS version.
• Try the whole thing over again. It only works on release builds, but not on debug builds for some bloody reason.

Each step of the way took at least 15 minutes of waiting, too, and now I still have to do the whole mess for Linux builds.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

Apart from that, I had the idea to set up a little home server, as a sort of side project. I had my old PC collecting dust in a closet somewhere, and decided to take it out. The idea is to use it as a Linux machine, put it out of sight somewhere, and run a test environment on it that I can access from my Windows desktop. I want to try self-hosting some services like my website and Git, and then mirroring them to an actual VPS hosting service or something.

I managed to get Ubuntu up and running, but failed for a whole day to install a VNC to actually be able to jack into the desktop from my PC. I think I’ll give it a rest until I speak to someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to this kind of stuff.