Hello once again, my dear blog. The last few months have been very busy between school, work, and projects, it's felt like a couple years by itself. After a considerably longer break than I had hoped to take, I'm now back at school, and have another successful semester down. The eternal lockdown tedium is lifted at last, replaced by a strange alternate reality that feels vaguely similar to life before the coronas. The classes were very time intensive, so naturally the first thing to slip was work on my engine, alas. After finishing the semester, I decided to revisit an older project that I'd been working on, a Go AI based on monte carlo tree search (MCTS), rather than getting back into gamedev stuff right away.

So, that's what's been up. Recently I've just finished an entry for Ludum Dare 50, based on the cumulative work that's been done on my game so far. My entry for this jam was "The Fight Scene" (source here) , essentially a short tech demo showing off some of the improvements I've made. The game is developed on the growing "template" project that is the game I've been working on. So, definitely check it out if you're interested in seeing the current state of things. Ignore the animations and light maps, I'm a terrible artist, and needed to keep it small for the web. :P Notable feature additions: per-character animation state, animations split across multiple files (for reusability), particles that emulate physics, some lighting fixes, etc. Not featured in the game is a raymarched fog shader.

With LD50 over, I plan to do some major overhauls of my engine, including new, solid UI stuff, scripting (probably won't be done by the next jam), adding a more flexible rendering pipeline, and so on. I also want to start doing more frequent posts to get some buzz on the social medias, so I'll probably start doing smaller, bite-sized demos and maybe some tutorials rather than ad-hoc bi-yearly digests.