december

The December Adventure is low key. The goal is to write a little bit of code every day in December.

—Eli, Oatmeal

🌱 🎄 (4/31)

Note: Time-tracking data under each section only reflects time spent coding. That’s why it doesn’t add up to the project summary at the bottom of the page, which includes the time spent writing these logs.

tilled soil and planted seeds

an untitled game, a blank grey canvas, and a little astronaut-like character sprite
an untitled game

This month I want to make a game with LÖVE. I still don’t have a clear idea on what it’ll be exactly, but I want it to have something to do with forests and plants. It could end up being a platformer, a roguelike, or maybe even just be an idle game.

Two things:

  1. I don’t have much game dev experience. Over the years, it has just involved a couple of Bitsy demos, a GB Studio project in cryostasis, and a handful of implementations of basic games.
  2. I don’t have much experience with Lua either, outside of tinkering with mpv scripts and porting a handful of my Project Euler solutions.

Anyway, I started small today: initated a repo and added a little bit of code for player movement—good old WASD. The sprite is a temporary placeholder and was ripped off of the aforementioned GB Studio project from .

handwritten ideas about the game on a notebook
brainstorming

I spent some time in the afternoon scribbling some ideas. I’m picturing a game where one could wander around the game world, collect different types of plants, and build either a farm or a garden (or both?).

4 entries. . 0.75 efficiency.

eyes glazed over

a field of flowers, one highlighted in moderate red
flowers of the field

Yesterday, cblgh and nonmateria shared some resources for both LÖVE and Lua. I love this about Merveilles.

Although it’s not really quite there, I tried implementing two things today: a grid system where plant entities would be placed and the ability to spawn in multiple entities.

I’m wrestling with imaginary pressures to push commits, but maybe the first few days or so would really just have to be me getting more comfortable with the language, i.e. thinking in tables. It’s like when you know words but can’t string them together to fully express yourself. (nods to the rewriting folks) On top of that, I still don’t know what the game is. I just have a bunch of concepts I’m trying to thread together.

For now, I’ll stare at this measly garden with eyes glazed over, waiting for the representative neurons to form some cranial committee and make things *click*.

mood: Flowers Of The Field — Sky Sailing

2 entries. . 0.5 efficiency.

tall grass

an astronaut in a monochrome field of grass and flowers
tile maps

I had a meeting-filled work day and went for a run in the evening so I didn’t feel like doing much today—played around a bit with tile maps and updated the UI, still trying to get a feel of what the game is.

I think I like tables now too.

local map = {
  {
    0, -- y2
    1,
  }, -- x2
}

for x1,x2 in ipairs(map) do
  for y1,y2 in ipairs(x2) do
    -- do stuff
  end
end

Also I spent some time designing proper sprites, especially for the astronaut character but the well of inspiration has gone dry today. There are a couple of holidays coming up this month. I’m aiming to do two sprint bursts and make significant progress on this project then.

mood: Wheat — WILDERADO

3 entries. . 0.67 efficiency.