100 Days of Dev: Series 4 / 2020 (Days 1-10) A New Start

On By Alex_ADEdge

Another 100 days of dev are lined up ahead!

After the issues during Series 3, Ive decided to do it all it again this year, but really backing off on the requirements. I want my focus to be on the work – not the stats, not writing blog posts, or recording videos, etc etc, just making sure Im working on projects and moving forwards.

So with this new challenge, I plan to just do quick(ish) update posts (like this!) every 10 days, just giving an overall look at what Im getting up to so that at least I have something to look back on to see what I worked on during this years challenge and a general idea of how many hours I was able to put in.

Days 1-10 Project work, quick summary: 

Projects worked on:

1) dogeDIG (gamedev)
Spent some time organizing past notes, since I have notes for this project spread all over the place, bit of a mess. Also worked on a script which generates random object placements for new chunks. Its currently just working for trees but will later be adapted for a range of things, from grass and flowers and background details like hills and islands.

Random object placement script, currently generating tree placement

2) Ludum Dare 46 preperations.
Ive been getting ready for the upcoming Ludum Dare gamejam next weekend (starts on the 18th of April), this included reviewing my LD45 attempt in preperation for the next gamejam: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/$182698/im-in-for-ld46-also-wtf-happened-with-ld45-quick-post-mortem

Ive also been continuing to work towards being able to make my own music for gamejams, which has always been an area I havent been very good with. So Ive been going through a series on VCV Rack, aiming to at least be able to make some ambient patches for future games, perhaps even next weekend’s gamejam if I make more progress in the coming days.

At the moment Im still very early on though, just learning the basics of controlling sounds and how the different components work together:

Learning the basics of VCV Rack

3) FSMP
Finally the 3rd major area of work this past 10 days (and what I spent the most of my dev time on) was on my experimental project ‘Forever Shores’, which is the continuation of my Ludum Dare 44 sailing game ‘Autumn Shores’. Ive been wanting to experiment with adding multiplayer to a game for a while now, so thats what I started!

Day 1: FSMP Dev (Forever Shores Multiplayer)

Ive been following this tutorial from Tom Weiland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh8XaC0Y5MA which starts off implementing TCP, and then also adds UDP.
After a couple more hours work I had TCP and UDP working well, and multiple clients could connect to the server properly. 

Day 10: FSMP supporting UDP/TCP Connections – neither client connected
Day 10: FSMP supporting UDP/TCP Connections – 2 clients connected

Next up is spawning in players and giving them control. But before I get too far with it I really need to work out the overall architecture in terms of player physics and world generation, Im leaning towards server-authorative which would mean a pretty big reworking of the server side.

Thats all for the first 10 days. 

Total hours recorded: 17 hours, 30 minutes