2024-01-15-devlog

This is the first in my series of games and experiments that I mostly anticipate to title after their release dates. The reason is that I am generally bad at naming things, and I really enjoy how the current date works as an infinite stream of names for projects/logs/etc. I have a history of game development dating back as early as 2014, but, in a way, I'm renouncing that and considering now a new start.

I'm inspired by games like Portal (2) and The Stanely Parable, which seem to have a literary component to them. Likewise I enjoyed The Beginner's Guide, with an almost tantalizing name, that echoes the common game development advice of making small manageable projects and really working on polishing and completing them. In that spirit, while the games in this series are pretty experimental, they are an exercise in completing projects.

This is my first complete project in Godot engine, and it is the first project where I used CC0 assets from a website like Polyhaven. This project focuses on environment layout and lighting. This is also the time that I establish some basics such as which first person controller I will use, how I will build and distribute the game, and the kind of media coverage I want to have for each project. I ended up using a free first person controller from the Godot Asset Library with minor tweaking. I originally wanted to distribute these projects as WebGL exports, but that wasn't working for a number of reasons. So I settled on exporting to Windows/Linux/Mac and making playthough videos for those who are unable to or don't want to download an executable.