Missed a week because of Christmas, that’s unfortunate. But I was busy, and it’s not like anyone is reading these right now anyway!
Last week, in addition to my weekly goals, I set one for the end of the year - a “playable” version of the game. That’s going… hmm, we’ll see. I have a bunch of features to implement tomorrow, probably.
If all goes well, expect a link here next week! But actually, this information is already available by the time I’m posting these.
I intend to host these blogposts on the web server my roommate and I run, and if you’re reading this then that probably means I got around to actually doing it. In which case, hi! I made this page in mostly pure html! What do you think?
Unfortunately, I can’t just write html like this, it would be such a pain. So I do my writing in a Google Doc, and I’ve been working on a C# project that will one day parse markdown from that doc and write html from it.
… Actually, in the meantime, I’ve just realised the extension I use for that can also export as html, so I’ll probably just… do that, huh. It won’t be perfect, but it’s better than nothing, for now at least?
A/N: Having now done this, the html that this extension writes is kind of ugly and not ideal in many ways, so yeah, at some point I will definitely be working on a more complex and comprehensive processor, but it works for now.
One day my htmlifier will work. When that day happens I’ll probably write in more detail about it.
Adelaide has a pretty energetic game dev scene, and the parts of it I’ve seen are really tight knit, socially. Which is great, I love that, and I would love to find a concrete place in an industry like that! And it means, if you’re kind of lingering around, especially in the parts where people aren’t restricted by things like contracts or company secrets and they’re eager to talk about what they’re working on, you get a little involved in a bunch of different games.
One person I’ve been talking to a little was asking, a couple of months back now, for help from trans people with designing and writing a trans character for their game. Which, in case I need to say it, I fully support; I genuinely believe that a part of the hate for trans people that exists in the world is drawn from a lot of deeply questionable media representation, and I think any good faith attempt to portray a trans character who is a normal person is probably going to help things get a little better. And this goes for other minorities too, I think, although I’m less willing to talk about things that I have less direct experience of.
That said, I feel a little weird being someone’s authority on What Trans People Are Like. Partially because I’m still kind of new to all of this, I only started thinking about my gender as a thing in 2018-19 which… was five years ago now, I guess. So maybe I’m not that new to that any more, but I’m still figuring out how to be a full person who exists in the real, adult world. I also suspect I’ve had a… relatively unusual time of it? I came out publicly to my Uni club, who just so happen to be the gayest bunch of people I have ever seen and I love them for it, I happened to find a job with people who were supportive once they found out, and now I’m just kind of out as a trans person in most of my human interactions and other than my parents I have never met a person who seriously had a problem with that. Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for that, but it’s been kind of an easy ride for me so far compared to a lot of people I have talked to, and… I feel like I can’t be the representative for those people, because how can I? Who am I to say that something is okay, just because I can’t see it being harmful from my own perspective? Who am I to say anything? And I fear the thought of helping to lead someone the wrong way, of contributing to something that hurts people the way we have been in the past.
But someone has to take that role, I think. When any person wants to learn, and wants to create something true to some part of being human that they don’t personally experience, they need someone to help them, and that person will never be perfect or all-encompassing, and isn't that also part of the human experience we are trying to recreate here?
Last week, I came up with Some Game Ideas. Not gonna say too much about that, because part of that whole thing was figuring out if we would make some in the future, so they're gonna be secret for now :)
I also did some work on stabilising the game this week, so that it can survive when the player loses and their ship is destroyed, but that's not particularly interesting except in that I learned a bit about ScriptableObjects, which I might write a bit about one day?
It was also Christmas! So I didn't do much.
By next week, I'm going to have put these posts online, and made a bit more of a webpage to put them on. I love writing html, it's so much fun.
