Progress: 29-jan-2026

Progress 29-jan-2026: plodding along

VFX and engine trails, and some cough research.

So I watched the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDFp0LFifc0 and now I know the profiler I’ll probably need is called Tracy.

Tried to get the engine trails to work, and can’t figure out how to rotate the VFX capsule particles to trail of in the z directing AND be rotated the right way. Nice intro on the subject over there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htRjt505sPg.

Read up a bit on the current godot digest here on Medium: https://medium.com/@scastro.me/godot-digest-38-10009817ac9f

Bought a donut shaped dog toy for the dog at the coworking office, and it went NUTS, and kept everybody from working by insisting it needed to play, NOW!

Polished my presentation for saturday’s game jam about game pipelines and free assets.

Found out my administration spreadsheets are on the backup and not on my drive… so can only administer things later, no this isn’t a cop-out, I assure you, it’s purely procrastinating.

Progress 22-jan-2026: on being stuck

So you want to make something? What happens if you’re currently “not in the mood”? Do you go the Stephen King route and “just do it”, or the Roger Martin route where it might be published posthumously?

I’ll publish this article and update it regularly, lets see if people reread it. And as a bonus I’ll put my current progress at the bottom. That’ll do it.

On being stuck: So yeah, currently I’m stuck on making the enemies for the SHMUP because the ZENVA course enemies are for a dungeon crawler setup and I’m making a bullet hell arcade thing.

And every time I open up the tutorial my brain just goes “NOPE!”. Might as well see if it wants something else, and do something I might need later on anyway. So I fired up garageband and made a nice intro for a boss at 190bpm, called it “go-nuts” and managed to get the intro going. Then got stuck, again. So I’m switching to Medium to write something out, and I’ll look up a Brackeys Tutorial on youtube, and then move over to some shaders.

Somehow, intro is fine, and then… inspiration is gone.

Progress:

I haven’t been doing nothing over the holidays: I was designing some ships and found out I made something the munchkins would use, let me elaborate:

I was working on a player ship that would have shields on its left and right wings for other players to hide behind. Basically those would stop bullets and might add some nice strategic play for boss dynamics in multiplayer.

And then I found an issue, with 32 players, and no “death”: what’s to keep players from picking a bad player and just use them as a shield?

So now if you loose all your bonus multipliers the player ship hitbox only registers hits but will not despawn bullets anymore untill the player regains bonus multipliers. This way I can keep players from using each other as shields. It also adds that I will need to communicate to players that their ship is “badly damaged”: so I’ll have to set the ships on fire and add smoke trails. This will obfuscate the gaming field (be annoying) and I hope that will be enough for players to try to do better, because the game will be difficult if you can’t see the bullets for the smoke.

So “yay! emergent game design”, and “boo” I’ll have to add more code for this… I love feature creep when it really adds to the game.

So on to do some shaders and some more game design.

Game design issues: One of the hickups I currently have is that players can pick colors for their ships, meaning I can’t have a generic color for enemies. This leads to having to design metallic shiny enemies because that’s the only “color” left. I’ll probably have to also add shaders to the enemies to make them stand out: I’ll need to add a neon shader on them to communicate to players whether the enemy is “decor” or “active”. I’ll probably use Godot layer systems for that, meaning a specific layer will contain everything that’s relevant to the game, and all the other layers will be “eye candy”.

I’m also realising why games with larger teams can’t innovate unless the team dynamics are fluid. I mean, just in a day I have, on my own, about 2 game design ideas added to the pile and I bet in a large team, with everybody working on the game, managing feature creep and strategic decisions would be hard. This would also explain why “the bigger the team, the blander the game” is just a side effect of scale, and why AAA games can’t innovate unless there’s strong leadership control.

Back to work! Ok, enough talking, lets get back to work, where’s that shader tutorial?

Report:

22–01–2026

• another boss music intro ( just the intro, need to figure out how to make whole traccks.)
• figured making enemies is currently not my mood
• switching to shaders
• game design creep and project report on Medium.

05–12–2025

• ship movement
• movement constraint to camera view and margins
• bullet instantiating
• transport-power-up-ship assembled model
• soundtrack for wormhole level.
• first enemy ship stand in model

Previously june — december 2025:

• set up pipeline from blender to godot
• made player ship
• set up mesh library and started the level grid map
• tunes made for first level and spider level