Hey friends! I skipped last week’s newsletter because I was sick. This one will cover that week’s stuff instead, which includes an indie publishing festival we went to, a Bibidi update, and a maaaaybe a new project?
How Am I Doing?
I’m good, but I’m working off a nasty cold. We went to Angoulême over the last weekend of January for FUTURE OFF, an indie art and publishing fair. My partner had a table there, and I helped out. It was a lot of fun!
There were multiple events organized throughout the city. We got to see a student expo in an old paper mill, an indie dream pop artist in a squat-like community center, caught up with my family, got to pet a goat, and we did a whole lot of therapy shopping. I also walked the old city walls at night, which was really nice.
But yeah, I guess over there I caught a cold that’s been beating my ass since last week. I feel a lot better already, but it knocked me out of my momentum for a couple of days.
What Am I Doing?
I’ve been talking about the Apprentice update for a few newsletters now, but this week it’s really coming! In fact, it’ll go live… tonight? I hope. If you want to test out this new playable character, please check out the Steam page, and let us know what you think! You need to at least have a fair fight with the 2nd boss to unlock the class, though.
The new character is not the only thing we’ve added, though. There are 10+ new cards, 20+ new sigils, and a whole lot of UX and balancing improvements. If you’ve been holding off on trying Bibidi because it seemed a bit undercooked, I think this is a great time to jump in!
Why Am I Doing? (this)
Other than that, I’ve cut the knot and decided to learn Bevy, an ECS game engine. For a while now, I’ve been finicking with my ECS framework in Godot, but to get it to do what I want, I need to essentially make modules in (and learn) C++. It kind of feels like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. I’ve tried existing ECS frameworks for Godot, and it just felt unnatural.
In a lot of ways, I’m kind of aching to go back to a simpler, less engine-reliant approach to game development. Bevy uses Rust, which seems like a really useful language to learn for performant app and game development. It also doesn’t seem as daunting to get into as C++ is.
A lot of example games in Bevy do EXACTLY the kind of thing I want to for my next project, like rendering thousands of sprites easily. It seems like a good shout to at least try to mess around with it a bit. I won’t jump into it right now, but I have been leafing through the documentation (and Rust’s) already. The only real hurdle is that I need to install a bunch of stuff using the command line tool, and as a first step, that always really demotivates me to get started properly.