Currently "playing" Godot 4.2 (the editor itself is built on the engine). I have some light programming background in backend Python code for internal company web APIs and the occasional Go app to bake custom sysadmin automation into a binary, but still nothing too special and someone who just came out of a CS course would likely know more than me. 2D is currently just enough challenge, so I'm a long way from dabbling in 3D yet. I don't know enough to dig into the intricacies compared to Unreal or Unity, so this impression is done in isolation.

I have zero art skills, like many I just grab free asset packs from Kenney or OpenGameArt and string them together into a game.

The editor is intuitive and doesn't overwhelm you with heaps of buttons and deep menus at a first glance. The UI is laid out in that you'll generally only encounter the features if you specifically work with them (ex: carving up a spritesheet, painting a level or setting up keyframes for an animation) but otherwise stays out of the way. I've hidden all the 3D stuff in the UI to make it even simpler. As a package it's surprisingly lean for having lot of integrated tools to reduce friction. It has a basic code editor (easy to hook an external one if you want), a tilemap editor, spritesheet parser, an animation editor, plus the usual like a particle effects generator.

2D project defaults seemed to lean very slightly towards platformers like a default gravity and texture filtering is on so you'll need to disable that to keep pixel art crisp, but nothing that can't be changed in a few clicks. Overall for 2D, a lot of sensible defaults that just lets you dive in and start working.

The scene/node system is an absolute joy to use once the concept clicks. You compose reusable building blocks of the game with nodes (say a character sprite and its hitbox make up one node each) and make a tree of them into a scene (a character). Then you put this scene (or multiple copies of it) into other scenes (say, a level scene) to build out the rest of your game. If you've used the Group/Ungroup function in Microsoft Office to keep shapes/objects together and make copies of them, you're pretty much there on how the scene/node system works.

It works very naturally with the bottom-up approach of game development where you start out with basic features and layer them on to achieve mechanical complexity. Then you can do scene inheritance to rapidly create multiple types of things controlled by common logic. Given how modular these scenes can be made, you can test them individually or combining sets of them together which allows for very fast iteration.

Just like cooking and gardening, there's a particular joy I've found in production instead of just consumption of content even if it's some of the most simple games ever made. It's my current go-to activity to keep my brain occupied.

After a few days of cranking out variations of shmups, platformers and action RPGs, some of my takeaways and quick notes about gotchas and figuring things out coming from a non-game dev background:

• Vector math and trigonometry, no way around it. There will be math. Shooty, bouncy and curvy things are slightly more math. From there, you can get fancy with Bezier curves to procedurally generate clumps of asteroids in a space sim, or linear interpolation to smooth out camera movements in an RPG.
• Switching to the mindset of expressing angles in radians instead of degrees. There's converter functions, but working with radians makes a lot of equations simpler and more natural once you get the hang of it.
• There's a handy and easy to use built-in A* library for pathfinding.
• Translating the wealth of Godot 3 tutorials into Godot 4, there's a quite a bit that's changed between the two that you need to adapt. Personally I find it a good learning exercise as well, so I don't outright disregard tutorials from a previous version and try to make it reasonably work in the newer version (ex: instance vs instantiate or how the options for tweaking particle effects have been rearranged)
• Input.get_vector is a powerful one-liner to get instant 8-way directional input with keyboard/controller/joystick movement and support circular deadzones. It replaces chunky if statements you've seen from older tutorials that manually check which input does what and having to do vector math on axes to get a normalized direction just to do basic movement. You're still free to roll your own input handling if you're building the next Elite Dangerous, since it doesn't do the Z axis.
• Plan out how to centralize game constants like base move speed or screen size, so you only need to make them once and reference them everywhere.
• Use clamp to handle operations on numbers like HP to a known range, so you don't get bugs like a powerup increasing HP beyond the designed value and is simpler than having to write a conditional to handle edge cases.
• Use signals from the start to organize and decouple your scripts. When you have enough scenes and scripts, it can be a challenge to trace which script handles what logic. Ex: in the enemy script, fire off a signal to trigger player damage and only have the player script actually handle that logic. Then have your UI script also listen to that signal so it can update accordingly.
• Only works with the built-in editor: Ctrl + drag a node or multiple nodes into the code editor to quickly setup a reference for that node in your current script. You'll use this a lot.
• Setup the special reset track for animations. Playing an animation physically changes its live properties, so if an animation hides a sprite (ex: a muzzle flash effect) it actually hides it from the scene. The engine uses the reset track as the reference for the default pre-animation state and saves a lot of headaches when trying to animate things in the editor.
• Also on animations, the looping buttons on the AnimationPlayer dock aren't just for previews, they're actual properties of the actual animation itself. Check this if you have bugs with animations continuing to play when they shouldn't. It's like the "One Shot" option on particle nodes physically affecting the editor preview itself.

Some standout videos I've used as a reference:

• Plenty of GDQuest and Heartbeast's tutorials to count, but a highlight is how to Make a Laser Beam in Godot in 1 Minute
• How to Make 2D Pixel Bullets with Collision Effects
• An introduction to Shader Art Coding
• This devlog in how he chronicles making a 2D shooter. Highlight is the second video showing what household items were used to make the sound effects

I have been playing Jupiter Hell, a roguelike made by the authors of DoomRL. I had played a little of DoomRL and liked it, and with a sale last week went ahead and grabbed it.

I have had a hard time getting into more 'traditional' roguelikes, by which I mean top-down randomly created dungeon crawls. The exception so far is Caves of Qud, but while I like it I hardly love it. I've bounced off of things like Brogue, Adom, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Dungeons of Dredmore, and more. Which is weird. I like turn based games. I like emergent gameplay. I like RPGs. I feel almost guilty for not sitting down and playing something like Brogue for hours at a time.

But Jupiter Hell really hits it for me. After turning off the absolutely awful CRT bending/scanlines effect, I really enjoy myself. I think part of this has to do with the fact I die a LOT less in the first ten or fifteen minutes in a run. I also appreciate that information is just given to me; I personally find mechanics such as identifying potions and scrolls tedious and frankly agitating.

The focus on mastering manuevering is really great, and depending on what you are trying to do it really emulates the feeling of Doom for me. For example, on harder Doom difficulties there is a lot of relying on staying at the edge of a wall and poking out and shooting enemies one at a time. But there are also times when you need to run around more aggressively to kill a specific opponent or avoid things like splash damage. Jupiter Hell does this, and with certain random themes applied to a map like summoning (where additional demons spawn at a portal unless you touch it first) it does push you to be more aggressive.

I haven't beaten it yet, but this is almost 'perfect game' material for me, though I'm not sure if it will end up there for me. The only games I consider perfect (when they released) is Minecraft, Pokemon Soul Silver, Mass Effect 2, Smash Brothers, and the holy grail of perfection: Slay the Spire. Not to say that these games are literally perfect, there are things I can pick at (hard-counter bosses designed to beat specific archetypes (a design choice, but one I don't like), Soul Silver's Kanto region, Mass Effect 2's scanning and a lame end boss, etc), but whose flaws are largely insignificant to my enjoyment.

I’m up to Dark Souls 3! The first one was glorious in every way, DS2 was exactly what everyone said it would be lol, but I enjoyed most of it nevertheless. DS3 has been great, until I slammed my face into the Pontiff at 60mph, still there today, working on parrying yeesh

Wandersong

What a lovely game. It's an RPG spoof, but you're not playing the hero, you're playing a bard. And that's okay! The Bard is super friendly, as in an actual non-violent pacifist who does their best to deescalate situations with apparent monsters and jerks and goes out of their way to avoid stepping on bugs out of sheer empathy. That's not to say the game's all sunshine and rainbows because the world is on the verge of ending, but they still go out of their way to help and believe in everyone. It's just inspiring really. something I would wholeheartedly recommend for people who take their time talking to everyone in RPGs.

About 12 hours long. The game itself is a 2d platformer, slight puzzle elements with no game over state with the right stick used for 8-directional singing. It also has a thorough chapter & scene select which is my favorite kind of New Game+.

Zet Zillions

A deck-building roguelike that just launched last week, same dev as Wolfstride. As satisfied as I am with the game and its style, it does feel like it launched in an Early Access state without the tag. Apparently the game is only up to Part 1 which I've completed, and Foam Gun's deck appears to be the only starter for now. I've wrote about the demo before during the Next Fest demos, but playing through now, I can say that the game gives a lot of opportunity to trim your deck size through Gaia's Altar and the Pineapple God which makes it easy to create fast cycle decks instead of taking a risk and experimenting with the fusion mechanics. Why bloat your deck and hope for card combinations when you can take good stuff that works 99% of the time? Something something optimize the fun out of the game.

Well it's $10, still on its launch sale, and it's in a bundle with Wolfstride which I've written about before.

Jack Move

Cyberpunk JRPG that I picked up from a Fanatical bundle. It really doesn't have any substance, I just got suckered by the cover art and the battle screen perspective. If you picked it up somewhere and plan to play, do yourself a favor and cut the encounter rate to half because it triggers every few steps and still has "just long enough to be annoying" loading times even on SSD and as a pixel game. Its only unique draw is that you have to buy your equipment slots and skill slots and even when maxed out, they're severely limited so you have to take a turn in combat to swap out your skills to whatever's appropriate. Well at least, I'm a little more grateful for RPGs that let you freely swap between your party members mid-combat.

Finally 100% Super Mario Wonder. Highly recommend it to anyone who loves 2D platformers or is looking for a fun time. Not going to lie, the final level was brutal.

Going to start Nobody Saves the World this week and may consider Dave the Diver next. Cocoon and Pacific Drive are in the queue. I tend to have a high aversion to grind so my friends warned me about Dave the Diver and puzzle games are hit or miss so Cocoon is also a maybe. Appreciate any feed back from those who have played either game or even Pacific Drive.

Diablo IV season 4

Man I haven’t had this much fun with a game in a long time. I played the game on launch and it was kinda boring, I enjoyed the campaign but the end game progression was pretty dull and felt pointless.

Now though in season 4 it feels like they’ve ironed out all the wrinkles, added a ton of qol changes, and have the gameplay loop down pat.

I’ve been losing hours every day slaying demons over the last week, trying to max out my Barbarian

Paper Mario, The Thousand Year Door, of course!

I'm so happy. While I still have very little hope for the Paper Mario franchise as a whole, it's nice that Nintendo at least cared enough to remake TTYD for us. All that bitching and whining amounted to something! For about a decade I've wondered, having not played it since its original 2004 release, if it was actually as good as I remembered or if it was just classic nostalgia blindness. Based on the remake I am pleased to report it is definitely as good as I remember! The music, the visuals, everything is--oh it's so good.

And because of that, I'm just more depressed about the state of the series. I thought Origami King was pretty good overall, but replaying TTYD has reminded me just how far the series has fallen. The characters have names! They actually have names again! I forgot what it was like to have characters with names, and lore! The world feels real for once, not a toy. Plus, combat is fun again and there's actually a reason to engage in the mechanics.

I don't know what Nintendo has been thinking for the past 20 years. I dare not hope, but I'm still really hoping that the recent influx of Mario RPGs is attempting to 'soften us up' for some major Mario RPG release on the next console. Sure, surely that must be the case. It must be...

Haven't had a lot of time recently, but I'm hoping this week will be good for me. I recently purchased a cheap eGPU for my laptop, which has been a absolutely awesome. It's not amazing by any means, but going from integrated graphics to a proper GPU has opened up a ton of options for gaming on my laptop (I do also own a Steam Deck and a mid-range Desktop, but I barely use that.)

Been trying to get into Abiotic Factor a sort of Half-Life survival game if you were a scientist or Barney at Black Mesa at the time of the Resonance Cascade. It's pretty cool, wandering around this scientific facility and trying to collect random stuff to keep yourself alive. So far, I've been mostly eating snacks from vending machines and drinking out of the sink; but I did just recently get a small garden build and planted some seeds. I'm not sure if it'll work without natural sun, so we'll see.

It's a nice new spin on the genre, as I'm pretty bored of Treepunchers recently, though I was never huge on them before, but I did like Valheim.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Decided to play some of RDR2 since I bought it last year and did not get into it up until now. It is genuinely a great game and I'm amazed at how immersive it is (bodies sink into mud, decompose). The story is an interesting one, I never played the original xbox games despite being aware of them at the time but I like how the main character (Arthur) has a deep connection with the rest of his gang-members and that they're portrayed as a group of people just trying to survive. Even if they are criminals, they aren't without their morals or compasses - I think Arthur being a very indifferent protagonist allows the player to insert themselves within his POV, in this sense he is a 'blank slate'. At the same time, there are characters who are clearly terrible (Looking at Micah only because he gave me a 300 dollar bounty) which make you question if the entire notion of Outlaws being the bad guys is actually true. Haven't played through much so I won't take spoilers.

I think the best part about the game is that the World is extremely in-depth and sometimes disturbing, many times I have wandered off the path only to find scary or unusual sights like mass graves, log cabins with nothing but skulls, and abandoned forts with (disturbing) letters from the civil war. It is a game set during the decline of the Wild West, where the West is settled but it's still wild.

I think people tend to scoff the AAA scene because of the 'lack of compassion' regarding producing blockbuster-level titles, but RDR2 is clearly a sign of many games from that area of the Industry being clearly revolutionary and innovative.

Descent
I recently got a PicoGUS for my pentium-dos machine and am trying it out with various games from the era. The PicoGUS is an ISA card which can emulate Soundblaster and Gravis Ultrasound cards with a raspberry pi pico micro-controller. For what the card sounds like, check it out here.

There is some sort of irony with using a micro-controller which is a few times more powerful than the system it is being geared on but I think it's much better than the alternative of scouring for a 30-year old card which probably does not work as well as it used to. I did test this primarily on Descent, which is a somewhat over-looked space game where you explore a series of mazes and fight robots while saving hostages. It appears to render the music correctly until a few levels where it crashes due to being out of memory.

In all regards Descent is an extremely fun game with possibly the greatest DOS soundtrack and a somewhat difficult learning-curve, the game can be very hard if you're trying it out with a HOTAS setup (this includes a period-accurate one) and you need to take into account the size of levels and exactly where to go. Still a very fun game, not sure if there's a reboot in the works.

I'm that guy that plays Witcher 3. Currently around 130 hours in. Not much to say, really. I have exhausted everything in previous comments, so to make it short - What agreat game even 10 years after it came out!

When I have too much of witchering, I start American Truck Smulator and do a few hundred milea in Mack R700 truck, the one that Kris Kristofferson drove as Rubber Duck in the Convoy movie. It is underpowered and slow once you haul something heavy, but it can do good speed when light. Fastest I've driven was 97mph and that was hauling trailer with cargo!

I have tried Warhammer Gladius or what is/was free on Steam. I grabbed it because, well, it was free to keep. I didn't know anything about it. It turned out to be a 4X type of game that is actually a bit less complex than Civilization and thus a bit more user friendly for me as a casual player of these games.

I've been playing a small 4x game called Civ-Hero, by WhaleBunny, on Itch.io. The intro level is simple and fun, and does a good job of introducing the resources. I feel like the tech tree could be more gradually introduced for new players, but if you know anything about 4x strategy games this is fun and easy to play.

EDIT: itch.io appears to be having connectivity problems!

I've started Hitman: World of Assassination again, and it's difficult. maybe I'm just not patient enough or something but it's definitely a game that requires a lot of time and then restarting. It's an incredible game though, and I think that it's a really incredibly good sandbox that I just kinda love exploring. Very immersive.

On the IRL front, I've been learning how to play Flesh and Blood, and getting my Commander games in Magic on the side too. If you have a LGS nearby and wanna try something new, FaB is actually a really interesting system and not too expensive to get into either!

Fallout Shelter

So yea, because of the show I jumped back in. I played it when it first released. There seems to be a lot more added since 1.0. I don't remember quests. That's a really fun addition. I feel like I'm more invested in building strong explorers for the wasteland. Watching ads is actually pretty rewarding. You get a lot of caps. It has helped me upgrade some big rooms. I'm pretty hooked in. As far as mobile games goes, this and Marvel Snap are my go to.

Men of War: Assault Squad 2

Recommendation from last week. Also maybe the best $6 I've spent in a while. Damn, this game is intense. And I'm still only enjoying the single player!

Live a Live. What an excellent little game. Have beaten Prehistory, Distant Future, Imperial China and Wild West. I'm generally aware of the big twist, but the little moments surprise me, and it never overstays it's welcome.

Spend all day at work thinking about the Present Day and what its gimmick would be.

We recently played the roguelike deckbuilder Lonestar for our podcast.

It has an interesting mashup between FTL style events and card-driven combat, where you have to go through 3 rounds of 4 bounties in ever increasing difficulty.

The battle system in Lonestar is interesting, as you have to match your opponent's laser strength with yours. And then it effectively becomes a chess puzzle if sorts where you are figuring out what sequence gives you the number you need.

The card draw system is also unique in that you assemble "cards" as a combination of random draws from a numeric point pool and a color pool. Each round you assemble 3 "cards" this way and need to figure out where to put your orange 4, blue 6, and white 1 to ensure victory for The Showdown.

Overall I thought it was neat, if a little raw from Early Access. The ship unit descriptions are extremely verbose and some of the terms see can easily be confused for other things. At least in my experience, one of my co-hosts had non-issue with it, seemingly.

The idea behind Lonestar is interesting but I'd probably wait for the full 1.0 release which should be sometime later this year.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

For the most part, this is a wonderful game that is absolutely plagued by technical issues. I really love the setting, the time period, the characters, the mechanics of the game, and so much of what they tried to do with it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make up for the myriad of technical glitches, stuttering, freezing, de-syncing, and just crazy technical problems that the game has. The corpos at Ubisoft clearly forced some poor developers to wrap up this game really quickly and then abandoned it when they rebooted the franchise with more RPG focus.

I started playing through the whole franchise a year or two again and am mostly a patient gamer. You would think that a nearly 10 year old game would run just fine on modern hardware but it’s absolutely unforgivable how badly this game performs and functions. I had to give up playing it on my beefy rig because the stuttering and freezing was so bad. I started playing it on the Steam Deck instead and, while it was a pain to even get the game to run, it runs pretty decently with some of the options turned down.

My biggest issue with this game is the lack of support from Ubisoft. Any tickets opened with issues, posts submitted to their official player support forum, or post submitted to the Steam player support forum (run by Ubisoft officially) are answered the same way - “this game is no longer in development and no further patches, fixes, or support are available for it”. If that’s the case why are they still selling it and allowed to sell it on Steam!?

It’s so sad. This could have been a great game. When the game is playable and you can complete an entire mission, the game shines and shows some really great AC moments. They kept the Unity parkour system which is awesome and created some genuinely cool new additions to the franchise (e.g., carriage chases in London that don’t exactly rival Black Flag’s naval battles but that add a fun, interesting twist to the classic gameplay). When you really get into it, it has some of the coolest, most satisfying assassinations and strategy but it all falls apart as soon as the game freezes mid-action and then ruins what you were doing.

6/10.

Reality Break, pre-release demo -- Was spending some more time with this top-down space shooter as I'm itching a bit for its release and I left my main character in a build that I didn't much care for, so I reset them back to the class I found most enjoyable and built them back up to a reasonable state, so when the game does release, I'll be able to go right from there and hopefully unlock something new for the next reset. I also made a new character of the type my main had been testing and built that back up a bit so I can see if it gets more interesting at release (there are some post-demo tools that can rewrite class attributes, which could have useful consequences). I already have another character of the third type (the demo only has the three), but that needs a redesign to have any point to playing at all, and the demo seems to not be getting new work while the dev focuses on finishing the game for release (full release, not early access). I don't know how characters and everything will work in the real game, but the game has a strange design kind of based on seasonal ARPGs, where you periodically can or must reset and start a new play-through with your character, so all that truly matters for now is the cross-run progression and I have a ton of that banked, so I don't have to care about grinding any of that in the full game unless the systems get wildly more expensive. I return to waiting patiently for "Q3" and wondering how the market will look at its rather strange design.

Combat Complex, pre-release demo and playtesting -- This more raw action, twin-stick style top-down shooter is a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm lucky the dev invited me to playtest (for once, my writing extensive feedback to help new releases was rewarded) so I don't have to just wait or replay the relatively small demo. There's zero chance I don't buy this the instant it has a playable price tag, but I'm concerned about how it will do in an early access that will almost undoubtedly be slow and unprofitable. It's an intense, gameplay heavy experience that's just lovely for a twin-stick fan like me, but the market for that kind of thing has just been painfully small regardless of how good a game the devs make. There have already been some people demanding they adopt auto-battler mechanics as though that's the expected norm for top-down action, and calls that this 2-3 person team "obviously" needs to build tons of fluff, because a game can't just be really fun to play anymore :(

Never Mourn, early access -- This is a weird 3rd person roguelite where you fight alongside your small band of minions through rather generic enemy rooms. The gimmick here is dual mode play where you switch between damage dealing abilities and healing/resurrection abilities. It's mildly entertaining, but way too backloaded on metaprogression, so it's going to be a lot of runs before I'm really getting to play it properly, which is a tedious problem of many roguelites. I had low expectations here and mainly picked it up just because it was kind of novel managing the dual modes, and gives you a lot of active abilities and play to pay attention to, even if the enemies are on the lackluster side.

Rogue Prince of Persia, early access - This new platformer roguelite just seemed an obvious thing to get at its early access price plus typical minor launch discount. It is early, so there's not much of the game there and it definitely needs some polish and attention for what is there (they've definitely made some surprising mistakes in the controller handling, which is especially weird for experienced devs presenting their game as controller-preferred), but it does have a fun fight feel that's a little different from your typical action platformer, which I think will give it some enjoyable legs. This just came out today, so I've only done a couple test runs and built a Steam Input configuration to compensate for their poor handling in case I play it more before the devs clean that up, but I don't really consider this project a risk or needing much close attention.

Oh, and a little Guild Wars 2, as my partner and I were pushing through their painfully bad story chapters in hopes of never having to touch those again. The new annual expansion model is not a hit with us, since we feel a great relief at being done slogging through their "story" so we can get back to enjoying actually playing the game, and having quarterly story assignments (significant things are tied to getting through the story, in case you're wondering) is just really annoying. Our chapters so far have of course been tedious, poorly built, and stupid, but at least there are only two left now, and then we're again "done"... until August.

Pounding away at Elden Ring to get a character ready for the DLC. Playing a DW Uchigatana Bleed build currently level 89. I also keep moonveil on hand when I need some mid range or cleave.

Cleared Rennala and Starscourge Radahn this weekend.

• Rennala not too bad. Put a couple attempts together before calling it a night. Next morning swapped out some armor for better magic resist and on a whim tried the skeleton archer ashes. With that she went down pretty easy.
• I've heard a lot about the Radahn fight. And it so far is my least favorite. Maybe I cheesed it but a pretty boring and long fight as a melee character. Pretty much just ran around on my horse keeping my summons up and hitting him with my bow (barely upgraded) when he was preoccupied. I'll have to watch a video of someone better than me taking him on.

Now I'm back in the explore/build loop. There are some Bell Bearings I need to go get and I need to find a somber smithing stone to keep upgrading the moonveil.

Then I'll go try Mohg, Lord of Blood. Once I have him down I'll pretty much be ready for the DLC and I can move on to other games for a while.

Took a second go at Assassin's Creed Valhalla while trying to find something I wanted to play. I'm an absolute sucker for big open world games—and loved Odyssey in particular—but absolutely nothing in this game is grabbing me at all.

Before that I spent a month playing Fallout 76. It's a pretty fun Fallout game with some social elements, but it's not £11 monthly fun.

If I go back a bit further to the last game I actually finished: Wall World. It's a unique-ish side(wall?) scroller where you switch between combat and mining on a timer, and at the end of each run improve your gear until you can survive several boss waves in one run and finish the story. I really quite liked it.