September

Development picked up again in September after a summer lull. I did some rethinking, wrote up a new roadmap, and followed through on rebuilding a new low-effort gameplay demo. I’m happy with the results - but not with the progress and management of the Godot engine. The writing’s been on the wall. Now is the time to cut my losses and move on. It’s actually a relief to wash my hands of it, knowing from experience that I’m not missing out on anything that could make my work easier.

October

In October I want to focus on artwork and music. We need some better material for stream intros, thumbnails, etc, and I want to show it off for Halloween. Once I get it into the new gameplay demo I’ll upload that too.

I’ll be streaming on both Odysee and Rumble. We’ve got a nice gaming/gamedev crowd on Rumble but I really want to build up the Odysee channel. It’s a very nice site where we can host all our content in one place.

Further Plans

As for a Godot replacement, back in April I tested some newer options for a custom engine. I would like to use Odin instead of C or C++, but it’s too new, too much effort to integrate everything. Maybe in a year or two. Meanwhile I’m gonna code a few Raylib-based demos in plain old C. If I can get my models, PBR textures and animations working in a minimal custom engine that’ll be a good start. We also need to integrate a C++ physics library - probably Jolt, Bullet or PhysX. I already made a GUI demo in Odin that I can port to C. Put those together and it’s a walking sim. Then we need scripting, navmesh and AI. Then we can port the systems/mechanics/UIs from our old Godot build. I have full confidence that it’s going to be better and less effort than Godot.

Gameplay is still a high priority. I’ve neglected it for too long while I was focused on Godot wrangling, art techniques, and character customization. If the custom engine comes together and I’m already fine-tuning player controls and combat mechanics like next week, I’ll just roll with it. If not, I think I’d better continue working on that aspect of my Godot gameplay demo. I just won’t waste time polishing anything else in Godot.