Blender is a 3D modeling software used across many industries. It is very intimidating, with tons of features and options. After doing only the most basic operations, I realized that I needed a bit more if I wanted to be serious, even while producing placeholders for my games. I just finished a course from Grant Abbit and this is the result: I had stumbled onto one of their videos before thanks to The Algorithm.

Playing with shaders I never touched this subject before, but a video from Kishimisu made me look into it. The video was so great, that I decided to implement his tutorial in Godot and add a few knobs, to be able to play with it interactively. This is deployed on itch.io here and you can play it in your browser.

I made a game for a game Jam and it was really cool. It was for the Dungeon Crawler Game Jam 2023, organized by dungeoncrawlers.org. I talked about it in my last couple of devlogs but also when I reviewed a bunch of games from last year. You can find the previous article here. At the end of the jam, we managed to release something we are proud of and that you can play for free, in your browser at itch.

I recently tried to train myself a bit for the upcoming DRPG Game Jam of April from dungeoncrawler.com. Also because I have many things to learn about 3D and Godot. To do this I followed around this video from DevLogLogan. First time I touched Blender, and it got me very scared. In the video, he talks only in shortcut and I can’t tell I understood everything I did, but it gave me the results I wanted (and I strayed a little bit away from what he told so I could learn more).

The last couple days I played with Godot 3D. What I want to do is little driving section for my VN, in between important scenes. I never touched anythign 3D and the idea was scaring me a lot. And it’s going fairly well, first I got some awesome car model from a friend. Aim was to go for low poly/PSX aesthetic and I think he nailed it. Second, with the help of some Youtube tutorials and Godot, I could put the car in action!

More goofing around with godot and it’s light system. I redrawn another car interior, put some music and an animation rocking. And it’s really nice! There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it. I then drew some anime girl and wanted to animate it as well. For my limited time and skills, I just picked the “squigly line” style, where you redraw the body a second time.

Since a little while, I have a visual novel idea, which would be a road trip in a old car. I was doodling around, trying to get a mock up for the background when it came to me that Godot have a 2D light system that could add a great mood. Fiddling around with the tutorial and light masks I finished ending up with this, which is pretty cool:

I finally finished my VN Engine. Well, “finished”, the backbone that make it more usable for me, than using a already made engine. I am pretty happy with the final result. For a reminder, it can: Parse a text into tokens Create a tree from this tokens Interpret Nodes from Tree to call different Godot functions Recognize resources in the game and set them up, before loading the scene. Reading texts and attributing it to characters Trigger godot events and play animations Load next scene on another file Have a simplified choice system, where further animation/text can be triggered.

I’ve been working again on a little Visual Novel (VN) engine made in Godot. I had something functioning, but I was not happy with the code structure, so I went to refactor it. I’m still struggling defining what I want to be able to script without effort. I find the script structure of Ren’PY atrocious for writing flow, and it surely requires a lot of copy-paste or custom script to put it in the Ren’Py format.