According to the dates on this blog it's been, let's see, a mere 3 years, 2 months and some number of days since the last entry on this blog, which frankly boggles my mind.

In fact, it's been so long I feel like I need to re-introduce the game I'm working on, titled "Spooky Pooky" (as much for me as for you).

The adventure takes the form of a 'one-world-opening-up-as-abilities-are-gained' stage (or metroidvania as these things are oft labelled), presented with just two dimensions (three were beyond the budget). It is a broadly set in the B-movie-sci-fi-horror genre (as popular now as it ever was).

The last post I made ended with a typically pithy predection:

I expect the next blog post will be titled "Why I moved from C to C++ to Unity in 3 months".

Nothing so dramatic has happened. In fact work has continued on Spooky Pooky with many accomplishments achieved, the wisdom of which vary greatly and albeit at a timescale more akin to arboreal giants than humans.

Everyone loves lists. Here's one:

• The rendering engine has been migrated from OpenGL to Vulkan
• The windows/audio/input support has been migrated from SFML to SDL
• There is a built-in editor for building rooms and the world. Tiled is no more.
• Rooms can be edited in-game, flipping between editor and game with a keypress.
• Sprites and tiles are being created with Aseprite (previously PyxelEdit)
• The engine performs live-reloading of sprite and tiles, which are repacked on-save directly from Aseprite with no export steps.
• The engine performs live-reloading of vertex and fragment shaders.
• There is a story! Mostly, with some gaps and many things to pin down.
• There is a 'scripting' system (not a language), whereby scenes and events can be scripted to some extent.
• Items can be picked up, as can weapons, and there is an inventory.
• The player can now die! In the game.

Those are the big things - there's obviously been a fair bit of tiny fixes and the like.

So ... progress of a sort. However, it ain't a game yet so an awful lot left to get on with.

In the world outside of Spooky Pooky I've been distracted by a number of other little projects, including a little CLI project management tool, and many, many Pico-8 prototypes, doodles and even the occasional seasonal game ...

Oh and I've also rewritten the static generator for this blog to add proper tags and pagination (since the devlog entries grew rather a lot ...).

My New Year's resolution (in June) is to try and update this blog once a week with an actual progress report, with the occasionally deeper look at some more interesting things (such as the custom editor).

I'll tweet updates on Twitter.

Right, I'm off to make a game.