100 Days of Dev: Series 4 / 2020 (Days 41-50) Read, Write, Blend, Re-Tweet

A very interesting 10 days to look at ahead… Also half way finished for this 100 Days of Dev Challenge.

Sticking with the usual format, heres what I worked on for days 41-50:

1) Mars/Starship Render
Following on from the last post, I spent Monday (11/05/2020) finishing my latest SpaceX Starship render. This one is a remake of the starship edit I posted a few weeks back – which was just the Starship itself… but this time I added in the super heavy booster (see my last post for progress pictures of development of the 3D model).

So after days and days of 3D work and photoshop, the end result:

And an alternate version without the launch tower – in the image below you can also compare it to the original photo (left) taken/posted by Elon Musk and my edit (right) where Ive added in the full vehicle (and some of the background) to get a real feeling of how big this rocket will be:

The tweet quickly started picking up the pace on twitter, with space-twitter (the aerospace community on twitter) getting hold of it, I couldnt keep up with the comments.
And then… about 24 hours after posting, Elon Musk himself commented confirming how accurate the render was:

The following day I started seeing the post turning up in SpaceX videos, posts and most surprisingly the tech news:

Its great to see so many people again inspired by something Ive worked on. The aerospace and SpaceX communities online (and ofc IRL) are places I want to be investing a lot of my time in the future, so seeing my work appreciated by so many is very motivating towards those goals and it shows Im putting that time towards a cause both myself and many others believe in!  

2) Reading & Writing 
After getting back into reading lately, the next thing I wanted to start up again is writing. Whether its blog posts, scripts for future youtube videos or writing about Mars, I needed to get setup again with my long lost writing software ‘LaTeX’. I havent used LaTeX since I was in uni, which to be honest was the last time I did any real writing, so I strangly miss the software! Its very powerful and nice to use, and the documents it creates are top of the line.

Note – With the reading Ive also realized I should at least be including the reading Im doing about Mars – which backs up the writing Im doing and including in this 100 Days of Dev challenge. So for this 10 days Im adding an extra 2 hours, to cover the research and reading Ive done so far reading Guy Murphy’s ‘Mars a Survival Guide’ and will continue to add hours from reading both that book and the next Mars books I have lined up (currently on order). I wont include any other books Im reading or listening to right now, theres a couple more but theyre not related to dev work, and so they dont qualify for this challenge. 

3) GameDev
A bit of gamedev was done this week. I continued working on the dialogue system in dogeDIG. And also started working on a 1000 follower special for a twitter (since Ive now passed 1000 followers). Not much else to show here on that work just yet though. Also Id really like to get back to that multiplayer implementation I was working on at the start of the challenge as well…

A final note on the game dev side of things, Ludum Dare results came out this week as well, with the results for my game (Commodore Commander):

It was great to see that out of entries overall Ive managed to keep in the top 10% for the overall score. And for Innovation I got in the top 3%! – unheard of since this has always been one of my weakest catagories!
I really like the amount of feedback I got on this one, and watching streamers play the game. Its great so many people liked the far from normal control screen, I think the overall idea of the game (controlling something via text input into a console) worked out well, even if it wasnt the fully realized idea I originally had. A fun gamejam overall, cant wait for the next one later in 2020!

Overall, travelling well with this 100 Day Challenge. The past 10 or 20 days have been a bit lower intensity in terms of dev hours, a few other things are taking up more of my time but I’m still easily finding that minimum 30 minutes most days. Having less/no social life due to covid has likely helped of course… But I hope I can keep this balance and productivity going for the 2nd half of the challange, and then continuing into the rest of the year.

Thats it for days 41-50, a massive post but a lot happened. Adding 11 hours and 25 minutes to the hour counter:
Total dev-hours recorded for the challenge overall:  117 hours