This game has become something of an obsession. Or, as the folks over in the meme-posting land of LinkedIn would tell you, a follow-your-passion moment worthy of some stock photography of me running through a field with my arms flung into the air.

Seriously, in this few weeks of downtime between leaving my part time job and starting back up some professional upgrading and curricular activities—and still, given that the weather is in deep-winter mode—I have little else to occupy my time besides consuming books and Netflix or making something cool.  So the video game design project has won.

All that is to say that I’m made some serious progress.

I am nearing the home stretch of Space Carrot, which was my design phase set on building out the equivalent of a game board.  Yeah, there is still more to do as the game design progresses, but this phase was all about building the world in which the game takes place, and in addition to previous updates I’ve made on this phase in the last few days I have added a lot more stuff.

I think the biggest of these is the furthering of my story system. Tweaks, again, will continue, but the core of it is in place.  The story-proper is a collection of ordered text events that appear on the screen moving the “plot” of the game along. When a room is first entered, when an area is first accessed, when anything of interest happens that could benefit from explanation, this all triggers a bit of the story to be loaded into the game and displayed on the screen. The game, as I have alluded to in other bits of writing, started as a story that I decided would make a good game, so there is a bunch of lore and narrative and characters that are all part of playing it.

Another big behind the scenes piece is the database system that is coming closer to a solid initial implementation. Behind every good game is a good database, after all. Databases in games store more than just player information and scores, but are sort of the malleable memory of the game itself. I can set all the pieces up as a starting point in the code and have it all initialize when a player first starts the game, but from there the whole point is the player moving, changing, unlocking, and advancing the game itself. Every time something happens the game can try to keep track of this and save it at some point, or—as I am doing—it can basically save as it goes. The advantage of the first method is that someone can reload and go back. That is by design not an option in a rogue-like because the point isn’t to save and progress, but to play over and over again trying different approaches, so a point-in-time save file makes no sense for that. Instead, the state of the single play-through is pushed to the database frequently unlocking and changing the state of the game so that when the player “loses” the game goes back to an almost fresh state—but certain aspects stick and are unlocked ever after and for the next play. A tool. A room. Et cetera.  The foundations of that are now in place as I creep closer to the end of Space Carrot phase.

And along with these two big bits of work I have not only done some bug clean up but also some key refactoring of the code as I (a) learn better approaches to things because I’m learning the language better and (b) encounter decisions that impede progress because of how I tackled it the first time. Not only does this mean simpler algorithms and code-reusability, but also building little functions that are like little single purpose tools to transform some data or extract a bit of something and give it to something else. 

Oh, and I’ve leaned into public constants. As I build it’s often easier to hard code numbers into things for the sake of speed and debugging, but as things grow and complexify, one realizes that changing over, say, a number used eleven times to define a spawn point to a constant makes it easier to update when the map shifts ten pixels to the right because of a design change. I spent an afternoon just replacing hard-coded numbers.

In the end, what this all means is that I am probably one more subversion away from declaring the end of Space Carrot phase and moving into the next one.  More on that later. So stay tuned.

The obsession is palpable.  Maybe, those LinkedIn people are right and when you lay awake at night puzzling over a code problem and are not laying there dreading the morning, but rather considering creeping downstairs at 3am to try it out—maybe that is a passion project. Grab onto that, huh?