Roundup, June 2017 - Lost in another dimension

It's that time of the month again, and I've made great progress!

Additional Comments

In addition to what was mentioned in the video, I also went back and re-added joystick emulation to the input code, as well as adding a few minor features and fixes all around. Besides the lackluster demo, this has been one of the best months for development this year.

Goals

• Time left: about 1 1/2 months
• Application Module: Done 
• Audio Module: Done
• Core Module: Done
• Gameplay Module: Done
• Graphics Module: Done
• Math Module: Done
• Resource Module: Done

As I said in the video, and as is apparent from the list above, I'm just about finished with dfgame for the time being. If you've been following along, you've probably noticed that I quietly removed particles from the goal list. This is because particles are a bit of an unknown for me.

"But wait!" I hear you cry. "Didn't DFEngine have particles?" This is correct, but DFEngine's implementation was super basic and not very good. My standards for features, while not amazing, are definitely higher than they used to be. If I were to make particles now, I'd want to use the GPU or at least some form of SIMD to get good performance. I played around with GPU particles last summer, but I ultimately ran into a few issues that halted progress and moved on to other things. A decent particle implementation will take some research and effort, but I don't know how much so I'm putting it off for the sake of polish.

Some Bad News

The main goal of my "End of August" timeline was to use dfgame for an actual game jam entry. Unfortunately, I just found out that for the first time in 15 years, Ludum Dare is being held at the end of July. Why? I have absolutely no idea. I could theoretically still enter, since dfgame's release is now feature-complete. However, I would be sacrificing about 50% of my polish time to do so.

Instead, I'll just keep an eye on the itch.io game jams page and select one in the right general time period.

As for next month's posts...beats me, I forgot to plan anything. Whoops!