22
votes
Timasomo 2023: Final Updates
Upcoming Dates:
- Timasomo Showcase Thread -- Sunday, November 5 (one week away!)
Technically all work should be finished before November 1st (but if you're running up on time, that's never really been a hard deadline 😉).
November 1-4 are for putting finishing touches on the project to ready it for the showcase.
If you need an idea of what the Showcase thread will look like, here's last year's.
Update us on your progress so far!
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What did/didn't you get done this week?
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Anything go according to plan?
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Anything go off the rails?
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Any successes or struggles to share?
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Do you need feedback or help on anything?
This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.
Pentominoes updates
Also, last week I forgot to include that I wrote a 2nd blog post about this project. The first one that I wrote a few weeks ago talked about some of the programming, this one is completely about the math.
I still have a few issues open, but the really big thing that I didn't want to do but needed to was to add settings validation so yay!
I'd really appreciate any playtesting / QA if anyone is interested & wants to leave feedback!!
Edit: Okay I've now pushed some changes based on the comments so far, and I have a few more that I'll work on still.
Edit again: I pushed a couple more changes & I'm now caught up on new issues~
Ooh, I love cozy abstract puzzle games, and "it's a single player game, make your own rules if you want to" is such a refreshing attitude for a game to have.
QA: I'm seeing it occasionally leave bits of a pentomino behind for a few seconds as I move around. It was actually hard to capture because it self-resolves after a moment, but here's one where I hovered over near the right for a while, then quickly moved over to the left and screenshotted it. Firefox 118.0.2/Linux/X11, in case that matters.It's unclear to me what the different square brightnesses mean, if anything. In that screenshot I've placed the two on the left and I'm currently moving around the other one.Edit: I think both of these are Dark Reader interacting poorly with the game. I can't reproduce either with it turned off. I've seen enough other things look wonky with it that I'd consider it their bug rather than yours.
UX feedback: it wasn't immediately clear that the single square with a dot in it was how you place terrain. I tried clicking the example pictures in the help screen a couple of times to see if it'd auto-populate that shape, which seems like a thing that might be useful to add.
"Reflect X" and "Reflect Y" seem reversed to me, but I can see what you were going for. Could sidestep the issue by calling them "horizontal" and "vertical".
final edit: I feel like "it's 1:45 and I should be in bed but I'm still playing this" means the game developer did pretty well, good job but also goodnight
This is really helpful, thanks!
I'll submit a "broken site" ticket to Dark Reader, and hopefully they can fix it. It's funny, I've almost felt like I haven't actually written any code at all & the entire thing is a giant hack because all I'm doing is changing the colors of some divs LOL so yeah if anything's screwing with the colors it prob doesn't work.
Ahh yeah, I can do that. I'll probably use a confirm() popup to warn about how it replaces your entire current board, but only display that confirm if you have tiles currently placed.
hmmmm so I can think of two easy things to help with this, 1 is just to explain it in the Info modal, and the 2nd is to add a title attribute so you see the word "Terrain" on hover. Can you elaborate on this a bit though? Was the problem you wanted to add terrain & couldn't figure out how, or was it that you saw that square and had no idea at all what it was?
tbh I think I'll get rid of the words "Left," "Right," "X," and "Y" - originally I didn't have icons so I needed the full text, but with the icon I don't think both words are necessary.
yay!! I'm so glad to hear this! I've definitely lost a HUGE amount of dev time on this because I'm just playing it myself haha
(hi, I can't sleep)
Some of both. I think I just scanned right over the square at first thinking it was a poorly styled horizontal scrolling button, since there's a horizontal list of things right there.
IIRC the sequence of events was
One moral here is that users do not read things :D (I do feel your pain here, I have this problem constantly with things I write.)
Oh wow, this was super helpful to read, and I think it gives me an idea that should solve the problem most of the way: I'll make the default board state (when no url params are provided) to be a grid with 4 terrain already placed, instead of a totally empty board. And then I'll add something in prefs that'll store in localStorage to turn this off, so it can be a little less annoying for people who know what they're doing, to have to unclick terrain every new puzzle.
I was actually kind of surprised you read the instructions at all! 😅😂
I'm chilling with coffee and enjoying this right now, thank you. And I really like the use of the pentominoes in the title design.
On mobile, I fat finger a lot and shifts become unintentional duplicates. The settings screen is hard to use, the gear icon is tiny and Save Changes is at the bottom of a pop-up that doesn't appear in its entirety. The bottom also gets blocked by the keyboard.
Maybe 16 is a better default tile size (for mobile at least). That way the default 8 x 8 board fills the width of the phone screen. There's also some vertical blank space between the pentominoes and the board, reducing that means having to scroll less between pieces and board.
It would help a lot if the most important options were bigger and at the top of the pop-up. For me that's the settings icon itself, the Save Changes button, as well as the tile size and board dimensions (which are already at the top). Having some default board sizes (6 x 10, 5 x 12, 4 x 15, 8 x 8) selectable at the press of a button would also be handy.
Yay!! This was my favorite part of the entire project honestly
Actually right now my sizes look like this:
Or specifically, on narrow screens the "size 16" is a much smaller size than it is on medium+ sized screens.
So...if you think
w-12 h-12is a good default on mobile, I could really undo this extra work, and use the same set of sizes for both devices. It would mean there are a few sizes that don't really make sense on mobile I guess, but that's probably the most straightforward solution here I think.Oh I can do some sort of positioning so this is sticky at the bottom of the modal and you never have to scroll to see it. I feel pretty dumb for not doing that already, thanks for this
I made the boards in Information clickable (not deployed yet cos I refactored a bit and I have unit tests but not component tests so I want to playtest myself a bit more before I push), do you think that's enough? Or would you still want this?
Okay I just pushed an update that should improve a lot of the mobile experience - I tweaked whitespace to be a lot less in several places, increased the size of the buttons a bunch (and tinted them more heavily so they don't look too bright), and made the "Save" thing at the bottom of settings static (including whatever warnings you get). I also made the display of colors a bit more responsive, so there's more width available at small resolutions, which in turn makes the boxes take up less total height if you've assigned all to the same color.
Let me know what you think & if you have any other suggestions!
It's definitely easier to use! Here's how the game board looks on my phone now: https://ibb.co/wdCXgZ5
The default cells and Save Changes are much more comfortable to use.
There's more horizontal room for the pieces, freeing up space for the 'current piece' display box which could then say tuck in a corner instead of bottom middle right now.
The boards in Info are all the way at the bottom, pretty unintuitive to click on them. I was thinking maybe buttons below the board, say below the Clear buttons to change the board size (that's a form of clearing too). I don't think having all the different configurations of holes for 8 x 8 would be that useful here (too many options), I think the 'handiest' options would be 5 x 12, 6 x 10, 8 x 8, those would be good candidates for the prime interface real estate there. This also cues the player that these are things to explore next.
Sorry my slowish response! I'd been awake for way too long then, and it was a while before I went to sleep even 😅
Anyway so, I've made a few updates focused on mobile usage (copied from my commit message):
How is it now?
Here's how it looks on my phone now: https://ibb.co/dck1B4L
On desktop the 'display selected polyomino' box tucks into the lower right corner fine. On my phone it seems the problem is with the box containing all polyominoes not stretching to the full width of the screen. The polyominoes happen to take up an awkward amount of space that just forces the display box to spill over into a new line.
I was actually hoping for 8 x 8, 6 x 10, 5 x 12 buttons just below the 'Clear All', 'Clear Solve' and 'Screenshot' buttons. (Sorry, I probably wasn't clear earlier.) Right now they're in Settings which players may not explore. But that's already much handier than manually inputting dimensions.
I feel it's worth having those options (which were what I most wanted to play around with) somewhere more prominent like close to the play field rather than inside a settings screen. But having 3 more buttons does make the current clean-looking interface more cluttered.
Please don't feel pressured by my feedback though! At this point it's just my minor quibbles. This is the first time a dev has responded so quickly to me 🙂
Ah yeah sorry forgot to mention this - there's some other actions that I plan to put here (Random Terrain, possibly some kind of toggle mode button which lets you enter a "create puzzle" mode in which you can place not just pentominoes but also "requirements" like "This cell must contain the
Ipentomino in your final solve"). So that space is actually not available to add so many buttons there.But let me think about this. Maybe I could change "Clear Board" to be "New Puzzle" as a dropdown and you can click either, "Clear Current" or "Random Terrain" or a set of dimensions...I could also open the settings dialog from here via some preference, maybe "Other Dimensions."
Can you tell me what browser you're on? In my inspector the box at the top takes up the full width so I'm kinda confused what's going on here, it must be a browser-specific issue.
Chrome 117.0.5938.140
The New Puzzle dropdown approach sounds good, that invites the player to explore other dimensions just as they're ready to play again.
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk I pushed a commit that hopefully should have:
A*" so I did some dsa bullshit and checked modularity of the leftover terrain. Absolute bullshit.First, before I begin, here's a link to the current version of the game: itch.io link -- to access the page you might need to use the password
timasomo. (If you play the game please let me know what you think! anything that confused you, that you liked, or disliked -- all feedback is useful!) This time I did manage to record a video of gameplay, so if you'd just like to see how the game looks you can see a full run in this Youtube video.The last full week of Timasomo! I had another nice week, at the start of the week I was still a bit sick, and also I was at work a bit longer than the usual week, but I still feel like I did a lot.
Most of the stuff I can think of now that I worked on this week, was a lot of quality of life features that were necessary to do at some point. I added some stuff based on the feedback from @TemulentTeatotaler (thank you!) -- optional damage numbers (togglable in the settings), spell indicators while auto casting (also togglable in the settings), new enemies that encourage the player to prioritize them -- one that shields enemies, and another that speeds up enemies. Also, I added saves, so you can now quit your run while playing it and continue it later -- I was putting it off, because I felt the runs are not that long (taking only ~20 minutes), but it's definitely a thing that should be in the game so I am happy I did it. Oh, and you can now access the settings during gameplay, also a pretty necessary feature that I didn't have before. And of course I added more content -- I added a new character, also added some uniqueness to the characters by making them have some small buffs, added some more items, and a spell (or spells, not sure). I really need to do more balancing too, for that I'll have to try recruit some of my friends to play the game, because my perception of the games difficulty is now extremely biased after playing the game so much.
I think my productivity did drop since the first week, but not catastrophically. Out of interest I took at the amounts of git commits I made: the first week was 34 commits, the second week 27 commits, the third week 24 commits, and this week so far 17 commits. Of course the number of commits isn't exactly proportional to the amount of work, but I think it's safe to say I am at least somewhat running out of steam.
Speaking of steam -- that's the main thing I really want to decide now. Do I push and release the game before the end of the next week? Or do I just keep working on the game. I think there hopefully aren't that many things that I'd need to do to release the game on Steam, I took a very short look and I would need to compile Godot from source, but I think I would be able to manage that quite quick, and afterward I would just need to setup the Steam store page and stuff like that. The main question is whether I want to get more content and polish in. As an example that's relevant to Steam -- I'd definitely like to have some achievements for the game, which I would have to setup. I am still deciding, but I think it's likely that I won't have the game released and done by next week.
Star Trek Text Game
Hello everyone, I don't have good news. Last week was difficult for many reasons that are out of scope for this update. I also decided to participate in a writing competition that pays money — and I actually need it. So I didn't even touch on my game.
I realized I made a mistake spending a lot of time building conversation counters — there's probably an industry name for this, but I'm talking about obscured choices that won't divert you directly to another node, but rather a set of conversational choices that add up to a future result. For example, if you're open to romance X times, then the character will fall in love with you, or maybe if you impress Scotty a bunch of times later on he will congratulate you, open a mission, etc. There is nothing wrong with the way I programmed it, it's just a matter of incrementing variables, but I soon realized that I was making some long-term bets and I would never be able to advance the narrative in time for those to ever make a difference. Then I thought about creating a bunch of puzzles instead, but the reality with puzzles is that programming is the easy part, thinking about puzzles that work and make sense in the environment is the hard part. Additionally, on the Enterprise, I am always going to different places, which requires me to think of a scenario and interesting interactions every time.
This made me think about throwing the Star Trek idea in the trash so I can deliver something that is interesting and can be played for more than 5 minutes. I have a very firm idea with lots of reusable parts, and, with all that I learned, I can probably do it this week. The competition's deadline is Monday, so I could work on it in the following days. Hopefully, I won't be too burnt out.
I don't wanna reveal the actual idea, but I can safely say that it is much simpler than a traditional text-adventure like the Star Trek idea would be.
I'm not sure what I'm gonna do.
Oh I am so behind, I'm going to desperately try and get the last bits of recording done this week, but I think I have at least 60% of the music still to record, so it feels like a tall order, especially given the complexity of some of the parts I have written. It's taken a lot of work to get usable takes for multitracking. Probably going to cut the video component of the project, but the music should hopefully be done soon!
Update to my update! I made a huge amount of progress over the weekend, and I've got some time this evening and tomorrow evening that might mean I can get all of the recording actually done. I might miss the deadline for a finished project though, as mixing and mastering are going to take an age. I'm currently on 28 tracks, and counting.
Pieces are done, I think. I need to print one out to make sure the holes are the right size, and to make sure the designs don't look awful in real life.
The board is still in progress. Had to scrap the plan of printing the white grid on top of a big black square–I don't want to risk the print shifting in some way while I change the filament. My current plan is to print the white part as a solid piece, and print the 32 black squares separately. That'll be easy enough to do in Fusion360, I just need to make a board and cut the squares out, then make squares that fit in those holes.
The turn indicator is still just a thought bouncing around my head. The next chance I have to sit at my computer and design something is Monday, so I have two working days left to get all of this designed. I'm gonna use the November days to get this stuff printed out. If all else fails, there will at least be decent flat pieces to use in the miriad magnetic chess boards already available online.
UPDATE: The board is now in that link. The board takes up almost the entirety of a 300mm print bed, so I would recommend using someone else's board design if your printer is smaller than a CR10. I'm gonna call those files my contribution to Timasomo 2023, and any printing I do in the next few days is just "finishing touches"
Fitness data analysis app (or is it a quantified-self app now?)
I have not finished the alpha version yet - it is taking longer than I thought (not surprising - I know the famous coastal hike story of software development). However, I am pretty pleased - I have made a lot of progress.
What turned out to be more complicated than I thought was the UX design. Nevertheless, it is a lot clearer to me now... although the app is starting to split into two:
I like the Timasomo idea a lot. It helps me keep in mind that I am not alone - there are other people struggling to create things. It feels like I am a part of something bigger. I wish every month was Timasomo month.
I don't want to overshare or anything, but I'm in a bit of a rough patch personally at the moment, and reading this was a wonderful bright spot for me. Thank you so much.
In the 'precursor to Timasomo' topic I remember you wrote something like "It's better to have Timasomoed and lost than to not have Timasomoed." That was a nice nudge for me, thank you, and thanks for getting Timasomo going.
Island is a simple strategy game about building up an island and keeping your islanders happy.
Gameplay video.. Text-only visuals, use the number pad to move around the grid and letter keys to build and upgrade buildings.
Details about how to play.
You'll need windows to run it. Two options:
Hashlink VM + bytecode. Unzip to a folder and run Island.bat to play. I'm not sure if Hashlink requires further stuff; could someone let me know if just the contents of this .zip runs fine for you?
Compiled .exe Run Main.exe to play. This should run, but it's much larger than the above version.
I had some ideas for more sophisticated behavior involving Goods, but not much time to implement and play around with them. Mostly interface and numbers adjustments this week. The game as it is presently is fairly straightforward, mainly just keeping food production in pace with population and doing a final push for Happiness.
I didn't manage to make much S P A C E either, this is going to be my year-end goal now.
Your Laptop Is Now A Typewriter (YLINAT)
is now (...just about...) feature-complete!
There are still a couple of options and things I want to capture in the conf/ini file, but mostly the next couple of days before Nov 1 are going to be about handling any remaining TODOs and squashing any other bugs I notice along the way, and then I want to use the November "finishing touch" days to give it some release polish and build some binaries for Windows and Mac.
If you would like to use this program for NaNoWriMo: Please let me know, either via DM or by replying here, and I'll put a pre-release version up on GitHub for you. Otherwise, I plan to wait until showcase day.
One week left! Can't wait!
Just wanted to say I love the title.
Project: Photo Zine
The zine is done... sort of. I have 2 versions ready, one for the printer and a digital version. I hesitate to call this version final, though. I at least want to sleep on it a little and see if there's anything I want to change up. Most likely I'd end up changing the sequencing of the images. The page layouts are all pretty simple (on purpose), so I think it'd be all the valuable to spend too much time tweaking those.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with what I have. But I'll need to psych myself up some before pulling the trigger and sending it off to the printers. (Not the least of which, because that means spending some money.) Just the regular anxiety of passing a point of no return. I'm going to give myself a few days to make any last edits.
Last real question is how many I get printed. I'm thinking about 10. Maybe give some out over the holidays to friends and family, keep a few copies for myself. Price is a big consideration with this. But I can always print more later. No need to go too big for the first batch (if I even print any more at all).
Excited to see everyone's end results!
Almost nothing happened on the USB charging station project. It was half-term holiday week so Kid was home and we were off all day every day doing fun stuff. I got a few hours today in which I mostly re-made the broken drawer pull and ran a successful test print on my new printer - maybe later tonight I'll print some of the cable guides I designed a week ago.
So now I have two days to find spare time in which to veneer the box and drawer, finalise and install the cable guides, design and install the secondary charger ports, then finish the wood and gild some stuff. Might be do-able but realistically I'm going to need all week.
On the other hand, I had an amazing week hanging out with a five year old having their first school holiday, so I consider that a win.
Hey @kfwyre, next Saturday is November 4th. Not sure if you meant to make the Showcase Saturday the 4th or Sunday the 5th.
Good catch! I’ve fixed it. The showcase begins Sunday the 5th.
That said, I have been timing the Timasomo threads to target Sunday mornings in New Zealand, so for many people it actually will go live on Saturday in their local time.
I do my work on Sundays and chime in on Mondays, so I may "cheat" using the finishing touches days to do what could have been completed two weeks ago had things gone correctly.
Or I'll take the L and just update in the usual weekend posts.
You have my official permission to cheat as much as you like, AugustusFerdinand. The Showcase thread will still be there if you need some extra time. Open secret: this goes for everyone, by the way! Creation doesn't always work on hard deadlines. Take the time you need if you need it!
It's ridiculous that the manual was wrong, by the way. This is why I drive only drive automatics! Car joke!
4WD Tercel Wagon Suspension Setup
Week 4: I choose to only accept partial responsibility for failure and there's nothing you can do to make me change that!
As I mentioned last week progress stalled through no fault of my own.
This week is more of the same.
Got the printer back up and running, a microscopic connector had elected to de-pin itself, the male pin might has well been a hypodermic needle for how small it is in my massive mitts (yes, I understand the irony of liking small cars while having huge hands that are difficult to find gloves for), so I swapped over to a more AugustusFerdinand-friendly connector. Redesigned the seal installation tool and printed it.
The tool has three major areas, the extended portion inserts into the transmission's output to center the seal, a raised area holds the seal in place by it's outwardly extended lip, and that is then at a height that properly seats the seal to the correct depth per Toyota's manual when the largest diameter is flat against the side of the transmission.
In short, print install tool, place seal on it, place tool into transmission, hit it until fully seated, lube up the seal afterward. Repeat on the other side.
Now that the seals are in you can install the front axles.
They are two different lengths.
Make the mistake of checking the manual only instead of also doing a part number check and a visual check.
The side with the c-clip (or without the threaded section if that's easier for you) inserts into the transmission, lube it up.
Insert it into the transmission's output, hit it until until fully seated.
Now insert the shaft into the spindle so you can get on with the rest of the list.
Immediately realize it's too fucking short to do so.
Check the manual again.
Check the other side of the car, notice that the differential is offset towards that side, so the shorter axle should have been installed there.
Check the part number and confirm that the axle you installed into the driver/left side of the car should be on the passenger/right side.
The manual is wrong.
Removal of the axle without damage requires a special tool.
A tool you do not have and cannot find locally.
Since the manual is wrong and you didn't check the part number before installation, you're stuck without being able to proceed again.
Move on to what you can do, even if it's not on the list.
In this case, it's putting together new swaybar endlinks to account for the raised ride height.
This is the old endlink with the bushings installed and a washer to represent the mount on the car.
And this is the new setup, same washer to represent the mount, bolt in place to line the two up for length difference, new endlink is adjustable should the pre-load be too great at onset (installing at the highest pre-load/shortest length to start).
The swaybar gets one set of mounts on those two plates with three holes at each side of the differential via these bushings and brackets. As before, lube everything up to minimize squeaking, install, and bolt in place, but leave loose for the moment.
Lube and install the swaybar end bushings.
Lube and install the new swaybar endlinks.
Fight torsion to install the bar to the endlinks.
Rear suspension is officially done as far as installation is concerned. There will be some adjustments made once it's on the ground and then torque everything down properly.
As far as the actual list of things to do is concerned, we've only made one more step of progress.
Install outer tie rodsInstall steering bellowsInstall ball jointsInstall knucklesReplace transmission seals(all are out, requisite two are installed, the third isn't needed to reach the goal)Finish rear suspensionProgress was slow again - also evidenced by not posting this update until after the end of October.
In the previous update I mentioned that I had to be offline for most of the time, and instead spent the weekend doing some math related to spacecraft navigation. I also talked about that I think my ideas for navigation will be workable and I hope they will be intuitive.
Over the past week I did get most of that implemented, and after some experimentation with presentation, I think those ideas on navigation are sound. With a bit of polish I think it will be intuitive ...
... but it's not there yet.
Here's a clip where I pilot my spacecraft from the Earth to the Moon; acceleration is 5g, and the timescale is 60:1. The trip takes about a minute and a half, like I hoped, although I timed the flip poorly and overshot by a few thousand km. In the clip the throttle is binary, either 0% or 100%, which makes that timing tricky. I've since added continuous throttle controls which make it much easier to fine-tune the final approach.
https://youtu.be/SUxkyjsZfnU
HUD information
The green bracket on the left is currently unused; it's intended to show distance information in the future.The green bracket on the right shows speed relative to the target. In the video, that's relative to the Moon. The slider shows your current speed as a fraction of the maximum speed on an ideal trajectory. Therefore in navigation, you accelerate toward the target till that "ideal maximum" speed, then flip around and decelerate till "zero" speed.
In the background there's a white line with some dots drawn on it. That traces out your future trajectory relative to the target, with markers at points of closest approach and slowest approach. The start of the line is more-or-less your direction of motion, although I'd like to add a special "prograde" marker for that.
It's a little easier to visualize that line in 3d, rather than drawn on the skybox. The trick is, it's not drawn on the skybox, it's just that when the camera is near the ship it looks like a line on the skybox. Here's a screenshot viewing that path from the side:
https://i.imgur.com/AVqYdno.png
This is clearly one of those areas that needs some polish. If you look carefully, there is a marker at the apex of the parabola; this is the point of slowest approach. There are also two markers to either side of the moon, one on the line and one not. These are the points of closest approach; the one not on the line occurred in the past.
So, some things I need to do to polish this and make it more intuitive:
In my comment on the roll call thread, I listed five broad tasks I wanted to complete for Timasomo: The Orrery, Networking, Ship Physics, Ship Controls, and Weaponry.
I had not realized that Ship Controls sort of implies a hidden task: navigation and planning.
So I'd say I haven't accomplished Weaponry, and I'm making progress on Navigation. I'm a little disheartened because those were the main thing I wanted to prototype here, but I think it's helpful to look back at that list and see the other 4 tasks are complete.
For final touches ahead of the showcase, there are still a few bugs before I could attempt to ship a binary.
Final Touches
std::quick_exitand some other STL conveniences are not supported there? From what I can tell, everything should work on MSVC so I wonder if I accidentally built with my MinGW environment. In either case I need to boot back into Windows and investigate.I think if I get these things in, I should have something to share for the showcase, but it's not quite going to be multiplayer-ready. I do intend to lean into the flexible nature of Timasomo and continue working on this. Once those six goals are completed I'd call the prototype "done" and ready for some multiplayer testing. I'm not sure what best etiquette is for sharing that secondary progress... another comment in the showcase thread? A new thread altogether? @kfwyre, do you have any recommendation?
So, if you're wanting something for this weekend for the showcase and you feel you don't have a build ready to go, you could share something like a video, screenshots, or a writeup (basically what you've already been doing in the discussion topics!). Your updates have been so compelling and interesting to read that you could compile parts/all of those into a rundown and make that what you share in place of a build if you feel it's not ready.
If you're comfortable sharing an incomplete build, I say go for it. Even if it's not done, you've still put a ton of time and effort into what you're making, and that's still something we can appreciate and celebrate!
In the longer term, with regards to secondary progress, you're absolutely welcome to come back to the showcase thread later to post an update. We had a user last year who posted their project to the showcase over a month after it went live!
Independent of this weekend's showcase entirely though, I also encourage any and all Timasomo participants to post their projects elsewhere (both on-site and off). The ~creative.timasomo audience is only a limited slice of Tildes, so by posting it in, say, ~games or ~space as well, you'd be getting your project out to wider audiences who might miss it here -- additionally so for posting it to X/Mastodon/reddit/Tumblr/your blog/etc.
Timasomo is, by design, an incentive to create but not an umbrella under which things live, so share your project whenever and wherever it deserves to be shared. It's yours!
Another note would be that, on Tildes, a lot of people don't sort by
all timeactivity. As such, posts in older topics don't resurface on their feeds. If you come back to the Showcase thread in a month or two to post an update, it'll likely be seen by fewer people. As such, I'd recommend your own, new top level post in ~creative (once Timasomo is over for the year, this group gets collapsed back into ~creative) as well as any related groups so that you get the visibility you deserve (seriously! your project is so damn cool).I had not explicitly stated it, and I suppose given the free-form nature of Timasomo there obviously aren't any rules of entry, but I was hoping to share a build and get some people online together and get some playtesting done on combat.
I'm one month older now and I think that's too ambitious.
Such a build might be ready by mid-late November, although at that point we'll get into holiday season here in the US so I don't know how much of my spare time I'll be able to dedicate to this project.
I'm so glad to see you've enjoyed my updates! I've been unsure where to sit in the balance between accessibility and technical detail, but I've erred on the side of technical details, if only as some developer logs for my future self. I will say you all are lucky there's no LaTeX support on this site or I would've thrown that in there, too. Felt a bit like shouting into the ether, but I'm very glad to see it's come across well!
I think as part of my finishing touches I will dump a bunch of diagnostic information to a log file, then publish that build. I already have
spdlogset up for console output, so ideally I'll just set up a logfile in~/.localor%AppData%or wherever with some instructions on how to share it. Since I don't use a game engine I'm almost certain the game will not run on everyone's hardware and I'll need some extra information to debug things.I think that addresses my question. Good to know it's acceptable to create top-level threads for these projects. I always appreciate that there isn't much self-promotion on Tildes, and I was wary of creating any top-level post that might come across that way.
Thanks for the advice!