Like every other well-intentioned blog ever started to catalogue one’s journey through their projects, this one swiftly fell to the wayside when my interest drifted to the side. As much as I would like to claim that this was but a one-off event and will not occur again (and profusely apologize while I’m at it,) we all know full well that the next update would then be equally late, or even more so.

Well, I’m not saying that not saying it will make a difference.

Having worked on Ablaze for a bit, but finding I simply need more artistic chops to be able to pull it off, I decided it was time to pivot a bit. A fun top-down shooter should be graphically exciting with particle effects galore, violent explosions and burning lasers turning metal birds to crashed carcasses. Alas, my artistic skills leave much to be desired - they are untrained, and would need quite some sharpening before they were made useful.

Thus my attention turned to my next idea, a Traditional Roguelike.

Behold, art! Behold, art!

Okay, I don’t intend to go quite that lo-fi. Simple 3D-shapes to start, then from there, low-poly models.

Which one are we?!

Theoretically that… may be better? Pracitcality is a secondary concern at this stage. The problem I ran into early on was that I needed to do two things:

  1. Equip Items
  2. Unequip Items

A simple enough task, save I did not know much about theming yet in Godot. “No matter” said I, ignorant fool that I was. “I will learn on my own by experimenting alone!” I don’t want to imply that they’re hard to use or anything, but if you recall a few sentances ago, my artistic skills line up with my artistic ambitions through most of my life - very, very limited. I hate to admit how many hours I spent fumbling about, trying a million different things, not quite getting things to work but getting others to, trying to use background images and borders in ways they were not intended, misaligning title and all. Honestly, it was a startling reminder of fumbling about with HTML and CSS in the days of yore.

Anyway, once I had exhausted my patience with myself and my ideals of learning on my own, I went and looked up some youtube videos on the subject. I found some, and lo and behold, had I but done that first, well. I’d have finished that particular problem sooner. Though it leaves much to be done - I’m not sure what to do with the left-hand panel, whether I should keep the list there or do something else, and I need to change the right-hand panel to pop-out instead - it at least is serviceable enough for equipping and unequipping.

Basic inventory, baby! Basic inventory, baby!

Mostly I want to save this to see what it looks like in a few weeks, after some more work has been done in general. But like programmer art, I will leave it there while it serves its purpose… and then get to changing the colours on actors that are not the player.