Timasomo 2026: Week 3 Updates

Since my last update, I have done a hot NOTHING!!

One of my primary means of child care for this week had a last minute drop in availability, and I'm hesitant to try and take my almost three year old down to the garage while I run the belt sander and orbital sander. So, maybe I'll get some done tomorrow. Still expect to be done before Halloween!

FPS Game - Roguelike Game Mod

Previously: [1, 2]

For the past week, I mostly worked on basic ideas for talents/curses, and skills/abilities that should be added or modified. Didn't come up with too much that's clever, unfortunately. I still have a bit to go on making enough for there to be enough variety, from my point of view.

While I slowly come up with more modifiers to the base game, I've also been thinking about balance, and how often a player should be able to be forced to pick a talent and/or a curse. This may be the longest part of the testing, since it would require some playthroughs. I want to get to a point where it seems like those elements have impact after a bit and don't seem like just a small addition, but I don't want to keep bugging the player every few minutes and eventually end up with ridiculous amounts of stacks of everything near the end of the game. I need to properly think of what should actually trigger a choice, which may be even harder.

I might also need some playtesters just to see what others think of it and if balance needs to be tweaked somehow. Alternatively, I may just throw it out into the wild with an explicit disclaimer, maybe make it a bit on the harder side, and see what people think of it.

Mostly unrelated to actual progress, but: I fell down a rabbit hole with a certain element of the game and figured that there are two mods that, put together, would put the game at a decent "starting point". Those two mods still have a bunch of the original bugs that I was complaining about in a previous post, but they either add a lot of other elements or fix stuff that's harder to fix and analyze just in code. I figured that my changes can easily be rebased onto that anyway. The authors have put out a guide saying what I can do to integrate their mod into mine, but nothing on the other way around. I sent an email asking if doing that was okay... and got nothing back. I may actually have to "join the discord" to get an answer for that.

As I have assumed I would, I did find time over the weekend to edit my short story based on solo RPG prompts that I wrote responses to. I was away from home so I edited on my tablet. I’ll have to check once more for pagination and alignment of drawings, but otherwise it’s pretty much done and I just have to export to PDF and also turn it into a blog post, which due to the platform I use will be a little tedious for the graphical elements.

Thoughts about it after editing: I can’t say I am seeing this as some major accomplishment, but more like “fun writing practice” to hopefully motivate myself to do more. But hey maybe I am just too harsh with myself. We’ll see once some people actually read this thing.

Work has been tough, so evenings have been lacking motivation to work on anything, but I hope the pace slows down next week so that I can fit some of this work in my lunch breaks. Evenings tend to be too busy during the week, between dinner, dog walks, family time. This weekend it seems the weather will suck big time, so I might just do it then.

Well, I released my Minecraft mod: Leadlight. It's only available on CurseForge (and GitHub) right now, but once it clears Modrinth's moderation queue (estimated another couple of weeks) then it'll be there too (link for when that happens).

Most of my time over the past week was putting together the mod description pages and taking screenshots to showcase the mod. You can see the gallery on Curseforge for the proper images, but in this comment you'll get what nobody else (besides me) has seen: what's lying just outside the camera's frame.

• The kitchen was my first build, and it's just a few walls, a basic ceiling which you can't even see in the final screenshot, and the worst farm out the back to make it look like there's something there. In the foreground you can see a demo I was showing a friend, plus the inspiration for the garden fence.
• Speaking of the garden, it's actually pretty close to the kitchen build. It's also just above the chapel which is, again, just a plain box.
• The screenshot of a player placing a pane into a window was taken at a place I built to have at the original icon of the mod, but later changed to the rose window. It's a tiny monstrosity of block placements, and no angle could capture its true unbeauty. The trapdoors and stairs were to make the right shapes when looking out through the window.
• The rose window is just floating in the sky, with the barest minimum built around it. That's actually the reason why the gallery image is cropped to be square, you can see where I haven't built in the full screenshot.
• The art gallery window is just a segment of wall, open to the elements (and the local invaders).
• There are two locations that didn't get screenshots. After seeing the diamond frames being so good as a garden wall, I wanted to make a little scene like the Lizard Consulate from Divinity: Original Sin II (a game I love dearly. This is the only screenshot I could find online, which doesn't really show it off). I started in one place, realised how wide of an angle I'd need for what I wanted and abandoned it. I then went somewhere with the water colour I wanted, but abandoned that because I didn't want the mangrove in the background. You can see the items on the ground from when I /killed myself.

I have some stretch goals that I'll be piecing away at, mostly adding new window frame materials. At the moment it's just Iron, but I'd like to do Gold and the 4 (actually 8, including waxed) types of Copper. I don't know how the game handles the aging of Copper, but I'm sure they did it in a way I can re-use.

Today's bonus image comes from debugging. In order to ensure I am drawing the glass correctly, I've been going into spectator mode, turning my speed right down, then clipping inside the frames to see where the vertices/edges/polygons are. Thanks to the near clipping plane of the camera, you end up with some crazy shapes.

Progress is slow, but we do have progress!

Was playing around with some basses in Vital while sorting through some preset packs and found a really thick dubstep bass patch that I fell in love with. Quickly made a bassline with it, added some drums, a bit of atmosphere and we got a vibe going.

Now the titan that I must face is arrangement, I have an intro going and the drop, but I can't seem to glue them together just right. Build-ups have never been my forte unfortunately, especially since I used to make very slow, melodic beats where I could just progress naturally through my instruments up to the climax.

I'll persevere through it and hopefully we have the first track ready this week. I'll have to make a miracle happen to get the second one done for the showcase, but I'm gonna do my best.

I'm building the Hotel Ritz bird-feeder house.

This monday I went back at it and I'm the living proof of measure twice, cut once. This week I made backwards progress... I had to disassemble stuff, throw out some of it, reuse some of it and make new parts including painting them. The painting, or rather drying, is what holds me back from further progress. I will do some stuff today. I will hopefully get to the point I wanted to make on monday.

If I make it where I want, I will be left with roof. I have to yet think of how to attach the roof so no screws are visible. I'm not doing wood joints or any advanced stuff. I may throw in some beams and simply do 90 degree corner on the beam or something similar. We'll see in the near future. My goal is to be done by the end of the month and it is sti perfectly achievable.

I will throw some photos here later in the day or in a few days.

Well went on vacation... I was still sick... Returned to a dog with acute pancreatitis. So I've done nothing lol.

I followed up on last week's decision to change my project and I've committed to making shears/scissors (I'm still not sure of the difference). The handles have been forged out (although there's a crack in one that I'm not sure about), the blades have been drawn out to their final shape, and the holes for the rivet have been punched. I've done a bit of file work on the blades to smooth and flatten the inside face, but one rivet hole protrudes a bit more than I realized so there's almost 1/8" (3mm) between the blades that will have to be solved with more heat.

So my plan for this week is to flatten the rivet hole, true up the blades so they sit flat against each other, and fix up the handles before riveting the two halves together. When everything is fit nicely, I can quench the blades like a knife (leaving the handles "soft") and temper for a hard edge. I'm not sure if that's a weekend thing, since Saturday is filled with Halloween festivities and Sunday is our anniversary, but the forge work needed should be minimal so it might fit in a weekday evening. If all goes well, these will be done before next check-in, let alone before the end of the month!

Outting myself here as being Mr. Alpaca, but yeah our dog got pancreatitis when we returned from vacation so no updates to my music project this week, been dealing with that. She seems to be doing a bit better but still on meds. Hoping that by next week I can try to get back into the music project.

I have progress but nothing worth sharing. It's al slow going over here.