Hey friends, hope you are doing well and keeping safe. The winter is in full swing and I reckon most people are back to work by now. In an effort to wind up the weekly newsletter again, I’ll provide you with a quick Bibidi update and some insight on other game development stuff that’s on my mind lately. It’ll be a bit of a read today.
How Am I Doing?
I’m doing good! I’ve had a great week with a lot of fun little social things. A good friend was over for most of it, we hung out, I got my ear pierced and went to a cool exhibition in one of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The building is crazy beautiful, and I really wanted to sniff all the hermetically sealed tomes, but I wasn’t allowed. (For good reason I might add.)
There was this exhibition on the Nabis art movement. It was a small wing, but packed with cool art using various methods. One of my favourites were Ker-Xavier Roussel, who made these beautiful lithographs with a lot of whitespace and soft colors. The other was Félix Vallotton who made mostly monochromatic woodblock prints.
vWoodblock is interesting, because you essentially carve away whatever whitespace you need. Vallotton almost did the opposite: he clearly went from a full black page to cut out contours and light. This process is so intriguing to me. It’s like creating light from dark.
What Am I Doing?
I’ve been juggling some things on the game development front as well. First and foremost: we launched a new Bibidi Bibidi update! I’ve already teased it last week, but the Skymap Update (v0.07.00) is officially out now, both on Steam and itch.io alike.
We’ve been sitting on this egg for a while, so I’d very much appreciate it if you gave it a go and tell me what you think! You get to fight that accursed bad guy up there. If you’re interested, you can check out the full list of changes and our thoughts about it over here.
Side Project??
While I’m convinced Bibidi will do well whenever we launch it, it’s always a good idea to have a backup plan. Some idea I’ve been toying with is to make a much smaller game on the side. I’m already pretty sure what shape that would take: a survivor-like idle game where you set up a hero that fights waves of thousands of enemies, without having to lift a finger.
There’s a couple of reasons why I’m in love with this idea. First, I love making systems that allow for crazy player builds. I’ve been looking for a game that allows that in the simplest, most abstracted manner without much interaction at all. The ultimate theory-crafting game, where you can make the perfect build and then let the game simulate it for you.
The other reason is that it’s technically challenging. Having many enemies on screen at once is a relatively simple problem to solve these days, but simulating all their behaviour, tracking their stats in addition to whatever hundreds of attacks per second you could achieve… in a game that you’re not even actively playing most of the time, would be a great learning experience to me as a developer.
Why Am I Doing? (this)
But therein lies the crux. Last year, I made a fun to work with ECS framework for Godot. I really love designing gameplay mechanics with ECS in mind and it’s a great fit for a game like this. That being said, when it comes down to it, it’s not reaching the levels of optimized performance that I want it to. I think doing calculations on more than 10k entities in really straining GDScript. It likely means that I have to dig into making a C++ module for Godot and I… just can’t be arsed to learn an entirely new language that’s arguably a lot more complicated than anything I’ve done before.
So I looked around for alternatives. It looks like Bevy does exactly what I want. It’s an Rust-based engine specifically designed for ECS. I checked out some tutorials and videos and such but lose all motivation the very moment I even have to set up a development environment for it.
The truth is… I just don’t have that much energy. I’m working on a game almost full time already, and the rest of that time I want to spend on literally anything else than learning the basics from the ground up. It’s a mixed feeling, because it feels like I’m becoming more resistant to trying new things professionally. Or maybe I’m just tired.