002: Forgetting to Post a Title the First Time Around...

Oh Lord, it's been a while since I last did this, let's see if I remember how...

Mortals! What's up.

This font feels awfully large...

That better? I dunno, it looks right on here, but I think it used to have a problem of text scaling between the post editor and the final piece. Always made the text hard to read on the actual post.

We'll stick with this size for now, and see how it comes out.



Anyway! This blog!

So, I haven't exactly been very active, development-wise lately. Stuff keeps getting in the way or seeming more appealing an activity. It was mostly D&D or video games, but I have been attending a Traineeship last couple of weeks at BT.

...Sorry, none of you actually care about my personal life. Right, development. No progress since the last post, so I decided to make this one to give me something of an incentive to get me to work on my projects. During my Traineeship, I was advised to look into software development as a career path, so, I thought, let's start making some software. Something that can be put onto a phone, something that can demonstrate my design and coding abilities (what there is of them).

Well... I already had one of those sort-of in the works.

This is the very lowest phase of a Tabletop RolePlaying Game (TRPG) Companion App that I thought I'd put together. Basic idea is that it would work on most phones, making TRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons easier to play. Primary function will be dice rolling, with a few other features built in, more as convenience measures to make the genre more accessible.

When I first started playing D&D, one of the first things I had to do was purchase dice. Like, a lot of dice. I've got maybe 30 or 40 dice just sitting in my top drawer right now, not doing a great deal most of the time, and I had to order them off Amazon, it was this whole barrier to entry for me.

Only problem is that I'm still trying to find all of my notes for this thing, I fear that a lot of them would have been lost when I last moved. Didn't record them in a permanent fashion, unfortunately.

But, worst case scenario, I continue by re-conceiving any ideas that were lost. Shouldn't be too hard, I'm not a terribly complex thinker.



So yes, that's what I'm hopefully going to be working on this week, mostly as a piece of evidence to show to potential employers that "Hey, I can do things, hire me!"

I'll leave it there for the time being, mortals. Probably just gonna type up a few lines of code and then go back to bed. Traineeship gets me up early every morning, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't resent that fact.

Until the next post, mortals, praise that God Emperor with all your might!

001: A Slow Start

A fine evening to you, mortals!

Ok, it's been... a week? Really?

Damn, that was a fast week.

Well, I've made very little progress with coding this last week, mostly due to massive time commitment to both job hunting and D&D campaigns. Here's what I have done:

Well, I've decided to focus on the JRPG for the time being as I get back into coding a little more regularly (after a fairly long break after finishing uni). Something about Flash is just... simpler, compared to Unity.

It's state at the beginning of this blog was almost non-existent, with only a few class files made in a sort of experimental build, just to see how I can make it how I think it should work.

Now, it's got a very basic movement system for an overworld grid, which still needs a bunch of work. It's just a circle moving around a bunch of squares right now, and I still need to properly tie it to the grid so it doesn't walk between grid spaces. It's sort of tied into the grid, but it can sometimes go in a different direction when the direction is changed mid-move (without finishing the previous move). It also seems to get stuck for some reason when this happens, and won't continue a previous movement after a new one is finished, even if the button is still held down.

...That's a really bad way of explaining it.

Here, basically like this:

• I press and hold left to start travelling left
• While still holding left, I then press up, and the character stops going left and starts going up instead
• I release up, still with left pressed; the character stops moving entirely

I want the character to keep going left after up is released (in that scenario), but it just stops altogether.

Nevermind, I'll figure something out. I always seem to.

(As a side note, fuck YouTube ads appearing at random in the middle of videos when it hasn't been refreshed in a while. Trying to listen to music here, but NO, HEY, LISTEN ABOUT THIS COURSE TUTOR, DON'T WORRY, WE STOPPED YOUR MUSIC FOR YOU SO YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS GUY! I swear, I'm on the cusp of just activating AdBlock for YouTube again. I love content creators, I really do, I want to support them, but I also want to be able to listen to music online without this shit. There's got to be a way to whitelist channels with ABP...)

Anyway, I've jabbered on enough. I'm going to spend a little more time with the movement code tonight, and then probably just go to bed or something.

Later, mortals. Praise the Emperor.

000: So, Here's The Deal...

What's up, mortals? I've decided to start a new blog.



For those of you who don't know anything about me (probably all of you, I'm not exactly a public figure), I am Stephen Hibberd, a hopeful, young games developer, fresh out of University Campus Suffolk's Computer Games Design course, looking for something to do with my life now that I've figured out that games development is not nearly as easy to get into as I was lead to believe.

This is the third blog I've created, the other two of which detailed particular aspects of my course and work, pretty much entirely for grading purposes. This blog will be more informal, as it's not getting marked or reviewed by any tutors or such, and will mostly just be me recording my own developments that I work on, professionally or in my free time.

I know that nobody actually reads these things, but hey, it'll help keep me on track. Plus, I like to pretend that someone's listening to what I have to say. Kinda like an Internet diary I'll write entries to.

So, then, where to start... This is an introductory post, first of all, and won't have any actual development content, it's intended merely to set the stage for future posts.

Future posts will likely be a tad random until I find my feet with a particular project, and then we'll go from there. Stuff that I might reference in my posts (other than W40k) include a couple of casual projects I'm working on, namely a super-simple JRPG I've occasionally worked on in Adobe Flash, and a Tabletop RPG companion app I thought might be a nice little idea. I haven't touched either in at least a month, so getting back into them should be fun.

Oh, and a quick warning: As this won't be being assessed by anyone and is more or less my blog to do with as I will, following posts can and almost certainly will feature strong language, as well as personal opinions, political, philosophical, and otherwise. If that's a problem for you, you have the utmost freedom to NOT CONSUME THIS CONTENT.

Not that anyone is anyway, of course.

So, with that, let the shenanigans begin!



I'll see you in the next blog post, mortals, and until then, praise the Emperor, you godless heathens.



EDIT: Oh, good, it's made the blog posts orange. I like orange.