On Saturday and Sunday I worked a bit more on the Javascript Game Engine, adding on to Thursday’s progress by enabling collision detection between the spaceship, the bullets, and an invisible wall. In hindsight it seems ridiculously easy, but at the time I had been daunted by not knowing anything about how the PhysicsJS library actually worked. I had expected it to be a pain in the ass, but my knowledge of physics engines from past run-ins seems to have helped guide me through the experience. I livestreamed the entire 2 hour session late late at night, but had to delete that stream because YouTube detected copyrighted music streaming from my iTunes.

To make up for it I made a couple of videos, this 20 minute overview and a shorter 2 minute progress video, which appears below:

I also put together a Javascript Game Playlist which collects all the progress videos so far. It’s kind of exciting to be able to see how the engine is slowly progressing! (more…)

On Friday I decided to update my Groundhog Day Goal Tracker Form, largely to raise my “big goal” awards from 10 points to 50 points to make them feel more epic. This turned into a four-hour rabbit hole of design revisions!

Here’s a comparison of version 1 (left) with version 2:

There is an archived livestream of the entire design session on YouTube, but here are the highlights of what changed:

• Eliminated the “Pursue a Desirable Result” section, because I never used it. I largely used the form as a reference just to see the “Menu of Goals” and “Goal Related Points” lists. I ended up logging my points in these blog posts you’re reading right now.
• Turned the weekly point tracker from vertical to horizontal. I was finding it hard to use the vertical format.
• Added a space to record total points for the day and the week, which I’d forgotten to do in V1 of the form.

I also made a few small additions/changes:

• The purpose of “Consult Menu of Goals” and “Record Goal Related Points” in V1 was to emphasize a process. In V2, I changed this to Milestone Reward Points and Daily Reward Points to emphasize the difference between big picture and daily activities.
• I assigned LETTERS to the Milestone Reward Goals, so I could write them in on the left side of the tracker area. These would then stand out visually on good days.
• I removed the extra bubbles from the 1 through 5 point zones. I never exceeded 5, and I needed the space to fit the horizontal tracker. Besides, if I needed more than 5 points, the little dots are there for just that reason…just use hash marks!
• I rewrote the copy so everything fit. There’s a new 5-point goal about leaving the house and the column hints at the bottom of the page have all been modified.

Sadly, my color printer is still on the fritz so I can’t even use this form yet. The Patreon supporters have gotten a rough draft version of the blank template PDF to play with, and I’ll post an updated version to this site when I can get to it.

GHDR Lessons Learned and Points Earned

For all the work I’ve done on this form yesterday, it’s not worth a whole lot of points because it doesn’t fit with any of my year’s goals.

PTS	DESCRIPTION
10	Packaged earlier result and made available to world!
2	Posted words on this website!
1	Researched various sundry things to make game stuff possible!

13 points. I guess that’s something! I do think the new form looks pretty cool…I really like the 3D effect from the colored lines. Looks exciting!

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Wednesday and Thursday were Video Game Days, which directly relates to Project 1401, my Javascript video game project. On Wednesday, I attended the Southern New Hampshire GameDev Group and got inspired by all the projects I saw, so on Thursday I worked on adding shooting bullets to the game. It was the first major addition I’ve made to the Javascript engine in quite a while. I recorded a six-minute summary of what I did, which is much more focused than the raw late night coding binge that I captured.

Now that I have a bit of momentum on this, I may try adding collision detection next. It’s amazing how fast one can work today by leveraging (1) The Internet and (2) other people’s code libraries to produce tangible results. (more…)