July Update - Game Development, Covid19, Writing Short Stories and Teaching Blender

So it's been a while. And I guess the world has become a very strange place since my last update.

After I finished my trolloc animation, I tried getting back into some game development, specifically I was trying to make some small games using the Godot engine, since I've wanted to make the switch from Unity to Godot for a while. But I had a really tough time getting into Godot and the project I made wasn't really very thought through so it ended up fizzling out a bit for me.

I think Godot is a great engine and that I will get used to it, I think maybe I was just a bit worn out and didn't have a great approach to my last project.

At around this point, the Covid19 situation starting developing and while I was already working from home on my projects, it has of course given everything a very different feel. My girlfriend is working from home, which is very cozy, but sometimes makes it hard for me to be productive as I use her precense as an excuse not to work on my projects.

I decided to take a few weeks off from game development and try and do some writing, but this ended up being a much longer process than I thought and I've probably been just writing for 3-4 months at this point.

I've always wanted to write a fantasy novel, so I went back over some ideas and tried to plan out a novel, but kept running into issues with my outlines, after a while I put the novel away and decided to try for some short stories instead.

This was also really tough for me, but I've managed to write two fantasy short stories that I'm pretty happy with, one of which I've polished and yesterday I submitted it to "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" magazine and I really hope they will pick it up. Even if they don't, I should get a personalised rejection letter and have some infomation on what I can improve in the future.

I'm thinking I'd like to try and write a third short story, maybe a science fiction story this time. And I'd like to get all three stories to a point where I can have them out for consideration and then give another go at a novel.

While I've been working on this, one of my friends who teaches game development at a local college suggested I make a proposal for an evening class teaching computer graphics at the college. So I did and it ended up getting approved, so I'll be teaching a class this October which will be very exciting and rather terrifying.

https://www.stjohnscollege.ie/3d-graphics-beginners-blender/

At this point I need to start getting serious about the plans for my teaching in October, so I'll probably be doing a lot of Blender work, but I would also love to get back into some game dev work. Maybe I could find a game project, that didn't require too much programming, but where I could stretch my Blender skills somewhat.

I'll try and do more updates, but I'm pretty bad at that to be honest . . .

Winternight

So I finally managed to finish my trolloc project, here is the finished video

And here is a breakdown of the character and the animation

And here is a 4K wallpaper render I made in case anyone wants it.

This was a ton of fun to make, but my god it is a lot of busy work to make an asset in this high quality and to rig it and animate it and I've basically been working non stop on it for three weeks. So I'll take a few days break now.

Homepage back up, Cretaceous Cravings 1.01 and a new project underway

So I've been mostly taking it easy over the Christmas break, but I have been working on a few things

I finally pulled myself together and set up a new homepage for Lonely Giant Games. This time instead of going for a way too expensive webhosting where I had to do everything from scratch I went for a simple Wordpress site that I can easily update and which was a lot cheaper. The site is now up and the domain moved so lonelygiantgames.com works again.

Meanwhile both Jungle Jumper and Space Sheep had been taken down due Google's new content policies, so I had to do a bit of work to upgrade their listings and resubmit them, they are now back up.

I've also been putting some work into Cretaceous Cravings. I definitely shipped it in a pretty bad shape to get it done in the two weeks, so it's been really nice to go back to it and work on it in a less stressful way. There are a ton of things that still need to be improved, but here is what I managed in this first update:

• You now only need to eat a single enemy to grow when you start out and then every time you grow, you will need to eat more to grow again.
• Adjusted the sizes of the enemies so there is always a good challenge.
• If you do get hit by an enemy, it only kills you if your Eat Meter is empty, otherwise it empties your Eat Meter and makes you invulnerable for a few seconds. This means it's pretty tough in the beginning when your Eat Meter fills up quickly, but easier to survive when you are bigger, but tough to grow, since your Eat Meter will get emptied from time to time.
• Water improvements - I was really sad that I didn't have time to do nice water shading in the initial release, so I took some time to make a few nice shaders to make water that looked like it flowed and made little foam rings around obstacles.
• Fixed audio bugs that made the growing sound not play.
• Fixed a bug where the enemies didn't correctly change colour when their size compared to you changed.

I'm already thinking about the next update, which will be centered around refactoring, performance improvements and setting up some unit testing.

 And lastly I've decided to do another crazy project for the next two weeks. I'm going to create an animated scene in blender of a Trolloc bursting into a room.

In case you don't know what a Trolloc is, it is a fantasy creature from the Wheel of Time series that is half man half animal.

I've had the idea for a while now that it could be fun to create a realistic looking Trolloc with really good fur rendering and I then got the idea to make it an animation instead, of the Trolloc bursting in through a door, like you first see them in the book series when they attack the Al'Thor farm.

The animation will only be a few seconds long, but will hopefully look really good. I expect I will use most of the time making the Trolloc.