Entry date: 2022_04_05

1. Rhythm Review

Been good. Kinda mad about not being as fast as I was back in unity, but hey, learning sucks on the early bits, I guess :v

2. Topic Review

I have decided to lowkey ignore cpp for some time, and I was planning to delve further and deeper into shader stuff, but I will have to play a bit around with it I guess. Spite, I guess?

3. Targeting

Make a game with unreal cpp. Hopefully something like a Hat in Time, but a bit simpler.

4. Remarks

I should not be this mad, it was my fault that I didn't want to work before, but I'm still mad that I'm behind, I guess.

Entry date: 2022_03_29 (So... Stuff happened xD)

A lot of things have been moving on fast, and I forgot to write down stuff here. It's been a nice ride, but let's get this up to date:

1. Rhythm Review

I have reached the point of burnout recently, lost my pace and completely got my sleep schedule flipped upside down. I have to start pacing myself again, and hopefully get some fun stuff to post over here.

2. Topic Review (more like topic choice really)

I feel like I will have to dabble into Blender, maybe Krita, and get some good models / textures to work my shaders with.

3. Targeting

Right now, I just need to get my shit done. It's been waaaaaaaaaaay too long since I actually logged this, and I kind of feel like I wasted time more than I burnout-recovered in the past few weeks.

Minor interjection (Living on site!) 2021_09_28

Previous scope gets yeeted, it's portals time.

Entry date: 2021_09_23 (First math week with Freya)

1. Rhythm Review

I actually felt slow this week! But not due to tired/hard stuff, I guess it's mostly pre-trip-stress. I tried to stray away from hard assignments too - Don't want to get my head hard-wrapped on stuff before the flight, otherwise I'll overthink it xD

2. Topic Review

Just... Mathsy stuff? I liked the laser thingy we did though. I kind of feel like it'll be best if I just focus on 2D or 3D SDF algebra for a while though. I have seen too much not to feel impacted.

3. Targeting

SDF's. Metaballs are kind of contained in SDF's as I suspected. Inigo Quilez has amazing resources! And I'll probably have a lot to get absorb by even going back to my previous SDF code :v

Entry date: 2021_09_18 (Swoosh! Assignment done)

1. Rhythm review

God. What a week - I managed to keep in tabs with sleep, but not much with duties. I had to sort out a lot of trip-relevant stuff, and I actually had good interactions with sereveral other students, but not much in terms of code production for myself - but hey, it was awesome to present my stuff, I had a solid ground for testing what was interesting and what wasn't on my things, and I'm a bit sad I didn't manage to get all my shenanigans done.

2. Topic review

I liked the assignment. As in - I really think I need to flesh out a lot of stuff, improve on the architecture, but overall it was a really fun experience, and I'm hopefully going to be able to turn it into a really nice sort of plugin with a little bit of extra practice.

That being said - I'm concerned with the fact that MAYBE this entire thing is a crazy overscope from my part and I'll have to heavily tone down a lot of features for starting out - and then improve upon a functional system.

MAINLY, I hate it I'll have to think of a Formal Grammar that allows me to math into the modifiers at will - Add, Increase and More are good ways to know if I'm on the right track though, but as was mentioned by David - it is not system agnostic, and I don't even need the foreach loops (not that I understand how that should work, but if it's possible, it's worth investigating).

3. Targeting

Screw whatever - I have to get back into SDF's, make some self-studied algebra on them, and get a better grasp on how they actually work - I think I'm going to dive into a "meta-gon" idea, as in, generalizing metaballs into a "base-less geometry" type of thing.

Now the question is - am I good enough for that? Hell nah - which exactly why this is an excelent opportunity for growth. I know I have it inside of me to do all of which is necessary, I just need to get my freaking life straight (these next two weeks are absolutely going to be hectic, hands down) and then step onto it.

• ! update -> Upon doing some bit of research I kind of noticed that metaballs are cool and all, but SDF's have a broader range of interesting use-cases, and I'm really considering dropping metaballs for a while, because I believe I'll bump into them as a subset of SDF's. And the whole idea of "generalizing metaballs" sounds exactly like the type of manipulation you can eventually do with a solid foundation on SDF's based on what I have been seeing.

And not freak out - that's quite important, lol.

Also - minor sidetrack note: to devlog or not to devlog? That is the question... I've been hesitant on it for a while, but I think I can get myself some comfy 3~4 hours on saturday mornings to do some lil' code stuff on the interwebs. Let's leave that to Sweden though.

Entry date: 2021_09_11 (Still stuck with crafting xD)

1. Rhythm Review

Nope. This week was terrible due to external factors - I'm undersleeped, extremely tired and overall not feeling happy with my productivity, BUT - I struck an amazing Game-Jam-Speeedrun of sub-16 hours for a 2D shooter with lots of VFX stuff. Noice.

I did get some people to talk to me, but I think this week and the next one are going to be all about people rushing into their big assignments... Crazy stuff.

2. Topic Review

I have been an absolute MORON on my architecture design, but that's not news to anyone - I think it was pretty good to get the assignment started as early as I did, because the architectural issues I've been running into were REALLY good learning:

When designing these "Lego-like-OOP" systems, I think it's best to make a flanking approach: I first tried to build the system by matching and connecting top-level structures, but that was terrible, so I instead trying making the bottom-level structure first, which also failed.

The solution (or at least what seems to be the most workflow-friendly approach) is to actually think through how a single unit of the system connects to it's top level and bottom level modules. By that I mean that I should NOT try to make things know other things from outside of their system, and instead try to make a unitary object behave as best as it can, "clone" it into a new type of item, and then see what's different between the clones.

I could just be biased because it was how this particular issue with my system was solved though hahahahaha.

3. Targeting

Gotta finish this freaking assignment. I'm surprised it took me as long as it did to get to where I am right now - but it's been good to see how I have killed a lot of inheritance, structs are the new bae, Scriptable Objects are terrible for lists and I absolutely need to find a smarter way to direct my focus.

I had to refactor the code way to many times already to make it modular - maybe it's time to settle for functionality first, flexibility second.

Entry date: 2021_09_05 (Poe's crafting is hard ;-;)

1. Rhythm Review

Fewer all nighters happened - but in all honesty, I also woke up late many days this week. I'm happy I woke up by myself on a saturday, but I'm terrified that I actually slept through the morning time soon after I woke up, so yeah... There was that...

I managed to help several of the other students earlier this week - or at least I hope I helped? I'm concerned with my improvement, of course, but for us all to go fast, I'd really like to know how the heck can I help -.-'

2. Topic Review

Wow, this last week was kind of wild. I started doing some brainstorming for my big assignment, and I'm REALLY happy I started as early as today. I can already tell how complex the entire ordeal is, and I had plenty of minor roadblocks/hustles already. I finished up the perlin stuff, I'm really looking forward to polishing it later though - maybe use it as a template to make a PMD Red copy like I always wanted :v;

I liked the whole "think of another game's system" idea, but I feel like I might have sabotaged myself into trying to 100% copy the system, because I did run into some inheritance hell by wednesday. I managed to solve it, but as David pointed out (huge shoutout, btw!), I shouldn't have used inheritance in the first place. I got annoyed because I thought that I was being careful with the architecture, but it turns out it was still spaghetti.

3. Targeting

Gotta pace it up - I've been very bad at optimizing my time into the assignment, and I'm pretty sure it's an uphill battle from now on, I can't keep going sluggish, can't have days like wednesday where I sulked for 3 hours trying to think about a smart solution when I know a suboptimal one - the first rule is making it work, and if it works you make it pretty - NOT the other way around.

And heck. I'm thinking about actually going bonkers with the assignment and just bake up a squares&circles ARPG kind of thing. Jocce ended up being fundamentally the most important person for me to do this - he literally pushed me just enough so that I fell from my pedestal of "I can probably do it, so why start?" to "I can probably do it - when do I start?" - and that might just have been the SINGLE most crucial thing that happened last week.

SO PUMPED. I hope to get something nice to showcase for next week (maybe apply glowy-shaders into rarity tiers, who knows?) but yeah - the whole system is going to take a while and I'm feeling considerably less comfortable about it now that I got my hands dirty - which is great :)

Entry date: 2021_08_27 (Jocce is a madman)

1. Rhythm Review

I HAVE to stop pulling all-nighters. I didn't exist yesterday, and my workflow has been that much better today after some extra sleep hours. And without coffee, even.

That being said, with regards to the code, I feel like I overpolished the Perlin Noise Assignment a bit too much (and had that grid-snap trouble, which took forever to fix) - I wholeheartedly hope that at least someone gets to read that implementation in the future, I'm actually quite proud of how it turned out :)

And uhh... I completely sunk myself into the Perlin thing, I believe the parallax assignment will be really fun to play with shaders, but I just can't get my hands off the Perlin-Walker right now 😛

Speaking about the parallax, I hope to find a smart way to deal with the transparency issue - I had not thought it through carefully before, so a cutoff value + a color-sampling-SDf might do the trick as opposed to my initial "value-reading" cutoff. I kind of wonder if this is heavy lifting for the GPU though.

2. Topic Review

Scratch anything and everything I hoped to do. This week was basically a LOT of code-polish, tiny method-refactoring shenanigans, and a pinch of SDf's.

I want to get back to SDF's and metaboiis in the future, but as of right now, I'm too hyped with this week's assignments (#3 and #5 are really shiny for me, and I might try #6 later next week.)

I also failed flat on my face to use my brain: grid-based movement requires some sort of "smart-snapping", and I only realized that I should have built that and THEN the move-point system earlier today.

Getting back to the good'ol RNGenerator + Grid movement was a great experience, but I feel as though I didn't improve much on whatever I previously had, save from learning the room-connection algorithms. I should probably try exploring different lin. combinations of perlin noise, and even venture a bit into non-linear combinations to find what generates more interesting noise structures for 2d slices :v

Also - I am deeply thoughtful about making a third dimension scroll-control to make the maze traversal more interesting.

3. Targeting

Sooo.... If Jocce keeps sending us crazy assignments, I might have my hands full for this log entry thing :p

However, I hope to be able to do his assignment stuff as he shoots them - it's a great deal of challenge and I frankly enjoyed seeing everyone else participate too - hopefully I'll find more people to share code with :)

I believe I'm aiming at a "remake" of the gridmaze game with the 3d scrolling as I previously mentioned - but quite frankly, I do not know how that will go :v I want to learn a bit more before going full ham on personal projects like that again.

Also - I drew some really nice textures for 2d filters, I probably should organize them and git them for future use

Entry date: 2021_08_20 (First week in FG_GP!)

1. Rhythm Review

Holy dolphins, URP is awesome, but I found myself going all over the place. I am particularly interested in trying to work some metaballs with marching squares now - what I DID study was a bit of procedural mesh generation (which was awesome) and then I did some basic pixel shading stuff.

AFTER THAT I got into some basic URP reading, and then I read/followed a tutorail for inverse-radius-squared-metaballs as a post-processing effect (with Unity's URP). The result however, was not entirely what I expected, and before I could notice, I was jamming into processing for some Creative Coding.

All in all, I'd say I REALLY failed in setting meaningful goals for my studies over this and the last entry. But I did study some cool, relevant things while I was at it! I want to have a solid guideline as to WHAT I want to study in the future, and it honestly sucks not to know how to predict the future, lol.

The better idea would be to just document whatever I study, but it feels wrong to just "study anything!" because that can leave room for useless weeks if I'm not in the mood, lol. That being said, I am going to slightly change the model for my log entries from now on:

1. (Rhythm Review) I will start with lots of reviewing/self-critic regarding the rhythm/improvement of my studies and log-entry miscellany like FG HOOOOYPE.
2. (Topic Review) Then I will point out WHAT I did study, how did that go and add relevant comments regarding a give topic.
3. (Targeting) The final section will be a "prediction" of what I want to study and a second option, based on a backlog. (Also some comments on decision making based on exposed topics.

The objective with the new format is to just NOT alow myself to remain idle - in case I miss the idea of "having a goal", that's fine because I'll have a "second option", backlogging and optimizing backlog organization will be crucial to make this happen. (Which is something I'll have to go over for at least a few hours every week, but hey - always good to have what to do)

So yeah, by the new model, the previous section was my Rhythm Review.

2. Topic Review time!

As far as mesh generation goes, however - I think I did a sloppy job in learning how to set UVs and I should potentially review that bit of the mesh stuff.

URP studies were uhh... bad? Total failure on not following it on my part. But that opened room to study other cool stuff.

I started reading the problem-solving book by V. Anton Spraul - really neat stuff! I would like to go over the ideas presented in the book in order to try and re-tackle mesh generation.

I did dip my toes into some stencil buffer shenanigans, but heck, as always I just ran away screaming because I had to read up a lot to have things understood, lol.

3. Targeting ( + )

Freya's recent Bezier video made me think... What could I do in terms of interesting math content? I do love myself some basic calculus and Algebra, but I think 3b1b has that covered nicely :v anyways - food for thought.

I should review the UV stuff for my Torus and S-slice mesh generators. (I don't want to though lol)

I found a Marching-Squares-Metaboiis article, it was a little sketchy with linear interpolation shenanigans, but the final result looks better than what I have, so I should jump into that.

I don't know what shader stuff I want to study, but I believe that Daniel Illet's dissolve or Ronja's Stencil Buffers are good options.

That being said: I expect to work on metaballs that have an ACTUAL good look in 3d, and if that fails, I think Stencil Buffers is always there, looming over me.

Entry date: 2021_08_03

I recently got back to adding content here - also filled up a LOT of shader stuff from a post-processing tutorial. I'm unsure as to how often I really should be updating my log entries, seeing how most stuff here is basically studied because of hype, lol.

I'm going to be giving a whirl at unity's unit tests and some compute shader stuff in the near future, and afterwards I'll log what I found over here - that sounds like a nice study goal!

• minor update: (2021_08_05) scratch out unit tests and compute shaders, I decided to read up some URP stuff

Entry date: 2021_05_07

I added Procedural Generation as a page to the wiki, I am currently looking forward to find a better method to organize this lump of links and references into something more concise.

But oh well - sorting and organizing things is important... Keeping a pattern from the get-go will help with that :)

Entry date: 2021_05_06

Greetings, internet traveler. I am a game-programmer and I do not know a lot about programming. Yet.

The objective of this wiki page is to be my guide and maybe your guide in future of your programming studies.

With all that being said, I should probably begin by saying that this is my solution to the question: "What's the easiest way to store my thoughts in the form of text within the web?"

So yeah - this page in particular is going to have a lot more of a blog/patch notes structure than a wiki structure. I wish you a happy reading here :)