Dev Diary 1

Over the past few months I have been working on a new app/gaem idea with a guy from work using the Godot Engine. It has been long process and I wanted to document some of the things I have already learned and what I would change if I could go back and tell the old me about it.

Git

Git is your friend, but it can also be your worst nightmare at the same time. Git is a super powerful tool for managing work, collaborating with someone else, and storing old versions of code so you can review if needed. Overall, I have been super happy with it, moving over from SVN, but I have also had an extremely hard time with it.

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Freeplaytech Complete

So I finally was able to complete the FreePlay Zero build that I have been working on and I have to say i could not be happier with how it turned out. I had a few minor issues with it that I could have fixed with the use of better tools, but we will save that for the version 2.0 that I will be making.

With a 32GB SD Card inserted into it, I have a large number of my old favorite games running, and I let the scrapper run that is built into RetroPie so I have image art to go with it. The sound is decent considering how small the unit really is. I did have some issues with the X and Y buttons, but nothing that could not be fixed later.

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Freeplaytech DIY Kit

Recently I purchased a Freeplaytech DIY Kit to turn my old GBA into a portable arcade. I am super excited about this since I can easily play all the old games on NES, SNES, SEGA, or any other system from my childhood. While the kit is coming in today I was able to snag the Raspberry Pi Zero and SD card yesterday.

Progress So Far

Pi Zero and SD Card - 100%

I was able to get the SD card built with the image, and I was able to get it into the Pi Zero. Lucky for me I had the correct adapter needed to get the Mini HDMI into HDMI, and then converted it to a signal my monitor supports. Once I powered up the Pi Zero I was able to see everything correctly and verified the SD Card was burned correctly.

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Popup Menus In Godot

Last night I started work on a test project, and I wanted to start using popup menus correctly. I had implemented them in my game ‘LightsOut!’ but I did not realize that I was using them incorrectly. As it turns out this Node is super helpful and pretty easy to use if you now what you are doing.

Working With The Popup Menu Node

Please note this is a super simple popup menu with three items. Each selection calls a function via a signal that passes the ID of the selection and allows you to go from there.

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It took me years to see that paying over $100 for web hosting for a few Wordpress sites and some personal junk was not really working for me anymore. I don’t really make any money off of the small ads I have on my site (Thanks for not blocking them if you see them), and I never really asked people for money when I made them a website. I used HostGator for a few years, and to be honest I am glad I am moving away from them. The price was way to high for personal use, and the support was lacking.

I can remember a time when my sites where being turned off for no reason. I got an email from a third party called SiteLock, that told me my sites had been scanned and there was malware and bad files. The worst part was they could never really tell me what files, how they got there, or who was accessing my account. It is very hard for a person who works in IT to trust a company that doesn’t provide logs of access to you. There were other times when the site was be shut down for no reason at all, and by the time I finally got through to support, the site was back, and they claimed it had been working the entire time. The screenshots that I had taken must have been fake right? Yeah.

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Story:

You are a hunter in the fifth fleet. A group of hunter, techs, handlers, and others sent to the new world to help study it and the monsters that live there. During your voyage to this new world, the ship you are on is attacked by the elder dragon, a huge monster that the research commission wants to study. and the ship is destroyed. You and your handler make it to shore where you meet up with the rest of the survivors and the make it to camp where the game beings.

Gameplay:

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So this year my goal was to cut costs where ever I could. My old hosting provide was bleeding me dry for money, and I always seemed to have an issue with them. Enter Jekyll, a free, simple, and lightweight way to blog using a github repo.

I have seen this before, and knew of a few people who were using it, but I had never tried it myself. Come to find out there are a ton of methods to install this ‘software’. A large group of people have made repos on Githib that you can fork and just start using. I went a different approach and ran through the offical install method.

I hope to have this tie up and running with more features, and plugins, but since I know almost nothing on using the GIT command line, I feel like I am learning everything all over again.

This is going to be a quick post about the site to update everyone (like anyone really reads this) about what is going on. Recently my hosting company has decided to scan a large portion of my sites, and mark them as malware.

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Over the weekend while looking for a new game to play, I picked up a copy of RimWorld on Steam. Without a doubt, this is one of the most frustrating, unfair, and extremely addicting games I have played in a while. RimWorld has a ton of modes and different styles to play, so I will keep it simple and discuss what I have done.

Day 1:

When you fire up RimWorld you can either jump right into the action. or you can play a tutorial. I highly suggest you play

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Slack is a relatively new product in the market that has had some seriously amazing growth. The Team Communication app has not only broken into the market, it has taken it by storm.

What Is Slack?

Slack is a team communication app at its core. What at first glance appears to be a simple chat room, or chat app is really much more more. From adding integration with other apps, to making special channel;s to discuss items that might not need to be in the general chat, Slack is your app.

Channels:

Slack has the ability to let is users add channels to their account. Those channels are basically smaller chat rooms that can be used to discuss certain parts of a project, or a channel that can alert you when GitHub is updated. All in all it is a very powerful tool that lets DevOps and Engineers use the same application in different ways.

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