July 2023

Health Problems and Update:

It has been a very long time since I posted anything on my site.  It has been a rough couple of years, and I am looking forward to getting back into game development again.  Over the last few years, I started having a lot of health issues which mostly could be correlated with being overweight and not exercising at all.  I started having chest pain, shortness of breath, tachycardia, and other heart related issues.  I was also having stomach related issues including chronic gastritis, and now chronic esophagitis, and Gerd.  It turned out that I was having Gerd attacks from what I was eating, and it was giving me heart attack like symptoms.  They also found that I had a couple of partial blockages in my heart, which were not helping the situation.  After multiple trips to the ER and many, many procedures, and doctors’ visits over the years, I am finally starting to feel better.  I drastically changed my diet to a very low fat, acid reflux diet.  I determined that whenever I would eat fats except a few types like avocados it would trigger my chest pains, arm pain, shortness of breath, and other symptoms.  So, I have not been eating those foods for the last few years, and it seems that I will never be able to again.  Due to the drastic dietary changes, I lost about 150 pounds over the period of a year and a half, and I am in a lot better shape than I had been for many years.  I still occasionally have problems, but they are much better managed at this point.

Game Jam:

About 6 months ago a coworker and prior student of mine asked me if I wanted to do a game jam with him.  So, we worked on a game for the Let’s Talk Game Design Game Jam.  If you are interested the game, it is available for download on itch.io for free.  The only rule of the Game Jam was that the name had to be from the letters LTGD, and we had about a week to make the game.  Our game was called Live Torment: Gary’s Damnation.  It was about Gary, a man with a bucket on his head who ended up in hell.  His goal was to collect souls for hell’s number one live streamer Lilith.  So, basically the game was a weird, janky, 3d platformer where you would go around collecting souls.  It was a fun project, but we really didn’t have the time to polish the game in a week.  Overall, I learned a lot from the project because we had to build a full game in a week and publish it.  I also had never used the game engine we decided to make the game in (Godot), so it was a great learning experience. The game also got featured in the Youtube video on the Lets Talk Game Design Channel which was a bonus.

Switch from LibGdx to Godot:

After the game Jam I was really liking Godot. So, I decided that if I was going to make a game it would make sense to use the engine.  I like the fact that the engine is open source and would allow me to publish the game without paying them to use it.  In the past I used LibGdx and I was coding my game from scratch in Java.  I think this was probably a bad idea, since I had to create everything to make anything work.  I ultimately was struggling with the procedural map generation and kind of gave up on my project.  When I started playing with Godot it was just before the update to Godot 4.  So, I waited a bit for that to come out and when it finally did, I seemed to not have the time to work on the project, due to my other hobbies.  Mostly wildlife photography and astrophotography as well as 3d printing and building robotics projects.  With Godot 4.1 coming out now I am hoping to get back into the swing of things and start working on my game.  I think I am sticking with the same idea of a procedurally generated 2d Minecraft / Zelda style game.  But, I may change my mind once I start. Most likely I think I will continue from where I left off.  I will be making a lot of new sprites as I was not very happy with them, but the idea will be the same. 

Plans:

I am hoping that I will keep up with the project and look to post at least one to two times a month, maybe more if I get a lot done.  But I still work full time, so it must be realistic with the free time that I have.  I also plan on updated the website to better fit the updated project using Godot instead of LibGdx.  I will probably also make a section on my site to host some of my other hobbies, since a lot of people are interested in my photography.  But I still want my site to be mostly about my game development.  I look forward to keeping everyone updated on the project.  Until next time.