Not to much of an update since I have just started the project, but I wanted to drop in and give an update anyway. I am also going to set this post as kind of a template for how I want to do these in the future so they are all uniform.
Currently I am going to be developing this game in Godot Engine mostly because I have used it before and I like it. Its pretty easy to use, and to learn. The better question is if I am going to be running this as a 2D or a 3D game.
Today Godot 3.1 was released to the general public. It just so happens that this morning I was talking to another developer I work with from time to time, and I said when 3.1 is released I have an idea for a new game. I just didn’t think it was going to be released as soon as it was, egg on my face.
I know that ads on a website are super unpopular, I mean come on how many different ad blocking extensions and programs exist out there today. I get it, I even added an ad blocking server in my house using Pi-Hole, which by the way is awesome.
I have ads on the site for two main reasons. The first being I wanted to learn how they work, and how to add them. On a normal site you add in the code and everything is normal, but on something like Jekyll you need to do it a special way. The second reason, even if I generate $10 in my lifetime using these, that is $10 I didn’t have before, so for me that is a plus.
In the spirit of being as open as I possibly can about this, I will say I have only made somewhere around $5 currently on the ads, and all of the ads are served by Google AdSense.
On a side note I have also been working on a large number of spelling mistakes in my website. Turns out I can’t really type to save my life, and I don’t proof read things before I ship them out. It explains a lot about me.
Lets not beat around the bush here, I stink at FPS games, and I really stink at games where I need to play against other people. I remember when my buddy started to play PUBG I was curious But I never tried it. I remember when Fortnite came out I never thought I would be good enough so I never played it. Recently while listening to the BombCast they started talking about Apex Legends And I thought it would be something I would be interested in.
I have always seen people use MACs, but I have never personally owned, or used one at work. Most of the jobs I have ever had no one really had a MAC, it was always a Microsoft heavy environment. Swap out the virtualization environment between VMware or Xen. In the worst cases there would be a hyper-v server or two running.
Having my own arcade machine has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. I remember going to the local arcade as a treat when I was good, and it was like winning the lottery for me. The lights and sounds, the smell, the choices, it was overwhelming in the best way possible.
I can remember playing time crisis, or DDR with friends. Sitting on a giant plastic motorcycle and really feeling like you are racing is a feeling that nothing has been able to replicate, unless you really want to go buy a motorcycle.
In a recent conversation with a good friend of mine, we started to discuss games were are playing or need to play. As we went on, it became very apparent to the both of us that the list is huge and keeps growing. We just never seem to finish anything, or we play a game that is to long and by the time we truly get into the meat and bones of it, something else has come around.
A friend recently asked me if I knew of a good way to block ads on his home network. At the time I didn’t, but I started to dig into it more, since this is something I have also been curious about. Ads have become more and more annoying and intrusive to our lives. The people that use them for the right reasons get a bad rap, by the people who hijack browsers with it. I needed to find something, enter Pi-hole.
The site was in desperate need of an update. Every day GitHub was letting me know that there were errors and risks on the site and that Jekyll was not running the best version. I finally gave in and decided to try and get this thing working to the best of my limited ability.
This was a tough one for me since I really never had to update Jekyll before. I was able however to download Ruby and install the Jekyll Gem on my machine. I also cloned my repo locally so I could work on it. From the limited research I did I found all I should have to do is run the following command. ‘bundle update’
Seemed simple enough, but it did not work. Jekyll stayed at the version is was running on and I was lost. It took a while but more research helped me uncover the fact that in my gemfile I was telling github-pages to run on version 139. This was an issue since it would lock Jekyll into an older version.
The fix was a simple one. Start over. I know to some people this sounds a bit crazy but hear me out. I never really understood how all of this worked before (Really I still don’t get it 100% but I am getting there). The best way to learn is to start back at square one and try again. I was able to get the latest version of Jekyll running, and served on my local machine. I did have some issues getting it running on the GitHub-Pages side of things, but that is another write up for another day. I was able to clean up the file and then get a new theme running. It did however force me to go back into all the posts and make some edits, since I had hacked them up before to get things like pictures working.
The result is this new and improved site. It looks better than it did before, and it seems easier to update in the future. I just need to be better at writing for it and making sure to give it the care it needs.
I know I have not really been working to much on this site recently, but now I feel like I have more time to do so. Recently starting a new job that will do wonders for my work and home life balence should also give me some more time to work on developing. I had some ideas which I will discuss below, but nothing is sticking as out yet.
I had a idea for a game that copies the old quick draw tpye games. THe ones where you had to perform an action within a small window of time before the enemy attacks you. Basic premise is simpe, high noon style dual. Once the players accepts that they are ready, a random timer starts, once it finishes the high noon type event starts. The player will have a very limited time to press the fire button / screen before the enemy player fires. Each round they player makes it through shortens the time they have to react later.