Happy New Year! 🎆
I hope you all had a good end to the year and managed to disconnect. I did not, but that’s just me enjoying my work more than is probably healthy 😄
December followed the usual end-of-year slowdown, but progress continued nonetheless. Documentation reviews moved forward, and a disproportionate amount of time went into… XYM City.
Site Configuration
🐛 Yet another documentation generation bug surfaced thanks to the barrage of new tutorials submitted by Zero last month. This one affected global functions, which no tutorial had used until now. Critter located and eliminated. On we go.
Review
:task-docs: CryptoBeliever wrote an OpenAPI spec for the upcoming bridge, which I reviewed this month. Besides documentation details, I suggested some endpoint name changes. If implemented, they required changes in the bridge code and in the test apps currently using it. The suggestions were accepted and the endpoint was renamed. I have to say, this did not usually happen in other companies I have worked for… 🥰
:task-docs-dev: There were no new developer tutorials in December. This was partly due to the holiday break, and partly because three of them are currently sitting on my desk, unreviewed. I will get to them right after publishing this blog post.
Writing content
🪶 The only content I wrote this month was the Qiita article, which I hope you have all read!
Daruma
:daruma-studios-logo-white: Most of this month was spent working on XYM City. That includes Christmas and New Year’s Eve. My family is not thrilled about this, but I cannot help it 😅
Here you have each task’s relative time distribution for this month:
This is the current status of all documentation tasks. The main line to watch is Symbol Documentation at the top, with all other entries listed as its subtasks. The bars in the chart represent how many of those subtasks have been completed. The change since last month is shown in orange.
<aside> ⚠️
The plots were not updated last month. The orange upticks you see below reflect progress made in November. Progress nonetheless.
</aside>
My wife and I are strolling through the park when she says, “You’re awfully quiet, what are you thinking about?”. I have told her a hundred times, but she still does not understand. Please, can somebody tell her that I AM THINKING ABOUT XYM CITY? 😂
:task-docs: I am constantly thinking about full missions, entire scenes playing out in my head, a building I would love to see in the city, or just a line of dialogue that strikes me as brilliant. Few of those survive close inspection later on, though. All of these ideas are structured and recorded in the game design document (GDD), in a way that should make them easy to recover later by whoever ends up implementing them.
Some days this feels daunting. Reading and watching a lot about game design has helped, and once a general structure for the GDD emerged that I am happy with, everything started to make more sense.
⚙️ I have also been learning about the Godot Engine and ported the game prototype to it, moving away from the beloved but ancient Quake engine. I still deeply like the way Quake mapping works, where visual and gameplay geometries match one-to-one, so the current goal is a hybrid approach: Quake-style maps running on a more modern engine.
The screenshots below are all taken from the prototype. Everything shown is provisional: characters, buildings, textures, and dialogue are being used to explore the engine’s capabilities and to get an early feel for how the game might come together!