📓 Notes

Yes I'm a day late. So, sue me.

I spent 3 hours on Sunday talking to one of my oldest friends, because I found out the appointment for his heart surgery is today(Tuesday). As of writing this he is now out and everything seems to have gone really well, so I'm happy.

🖥️ Dev Log

Last week was a bit of a Game Development week, I managed to add in a few new new parts.

Input Manager

New Service/Game Component, updates in the background and exposes an interface with methods for checking the State of Keyboard/Mouse/Game-pad. Also has a few events that will trigger for Standard things like:-

• F12 - Trigger the Screenshot event
• Alt+Return - Toggle Full-screen/Windowed
• ¬ what used to be ~. On the number row the key left of 1 - Hook for a Command Line Interpreter.
• There are some methods for menu handling as well.

Display Manager

Not finished yet but this one handles everything to do with graphics, as well as holding the Extended SpriteBatch, Font Manager and Animation Manager. Chief of concerns is picking the right screen mode and if needed adding the black bars for letter/pillar-boxing the game screen. Once I get further down the road it's probably going to be responsible for Anti-Aliasing.

Sprite Pack

So back in the day Kelly Gravelyn wrote a windows app called sprPack and open sourced it. I used it a lot, and a few years ago I needed it again but for Linux. I dug out the old code and asked if I could carry on with it. Kelly wasn't interested in keeping it so off I went and made a command line version from the original.

It was on Sh!tHub, but I'm not using that now. You can find the current version on Codeberg.

I've had a few ideas how I can improve it that should make it more useful but I want to see what's going to happen to the content pipeline first.

🕸️ Links

📰 Blog posts

• For sale: strong opinions; never published

  But sometimes strong opinions don’t need to be published because we’re living with the reality that prompted the opinion every day.

• Is indie game dev even viable as a business in 2025?
  Another from Cliffski's Blog, if the reason you're doing it is to make money, no. If you're in it for the fun of it, maybe. I've given up on the thought of making money from making games. What I do now is just for fun.

📺 Video Links

• RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods - YouTube
  Interesting to hear how he sees it as story engine and not a game.
• MonoGame University - 2D Tutorial Walkthrough - The beginning w/Simon - YouTube
  If you were disappointed I didn't go a head with my tutorials try this one out, it's looking good.

🕹️ Game Links

• If you don't have a basic understanding of c# you could always start with the C# Yellow Book by rob miles
• Rheyan's GameDev
  Not many posts but it does feed nicely into her YouTube Channel.
• CS50's Introduction to Game Development
  Rheyan's posts lead me to finding this course from Harvard, it uses Lua as it language but that just means you need to really understand the code to convert it to c# for your own work.
• CIS 580: Foundations of Game Programming :: K-State CIS 580 Textbook
  Another one from Rheyan, this one is for MonoGame. Not sure which version but it should still be good.
• Limbo, Death and Beyond | Sigil of Kings
  A devLog, about how he's thinking of handeling death in his cRPG/roguelike.
• The 25 Best Indie Platformer Games On Steam
  Some I've seen some I haven't, a good mix of interesting indie Games.

📚 Reading

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Page 206 of 317 (65%) Disclaimer

🎞️ Films

• The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025)
  I liked the aesthetics, and that it wasn't trying to be part of the 616 universe, and the story was cool.
• Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024)
  Don't know how I missed this. I was sad it wasn't Ron Perlman but the new guy was still good. A way darker vision, it felt more like the way I've seen them in the comics and way more Dark Horse and I loved it for that.
• X-Men: First Class (2011)
  A classic, I needed a pick-me-up.

📺 TV

• Great British Bake off (2010) Series 16
  Well the final was no surprise, hope it's more interesting next year.
• Taskmaster (2015) Series 20
• Never Mind the Buzzcocks Series 33
• QI (2003) Series W
• Have I Got News for You (UK) (1990) Series 70
• TRON: Uprising(2012)
  Joel was right, it is the best in the franchise. If for no other reason than It expands on the world of the grid without making it about a human. It's the part of Tron I always wanted to see them do more with. For me the meat bagspeople were a distraction from what I found interesting. If they had to have any interaction with the outside world. I would have wanted it to have been seriously time dilated, to emphasise that the grid runs at a faster rate than the world of the real. Anyway they only gave us one series so that's a moot point now, shame.
• The Amazing Digital Circus (2023)
  I thought this had finished a full season but I can only watch the first 4 episodes even though 6 have been released. Its good so I'll just have to wait for Netflix to pull its finger out and release the rest.
• The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023) Season 3
• I enjoyed it again this season. It felt like they were going for a spaghetti western sort of vibe.

Like my Friend, Stay Lucky.👨‍⚕️