Hey all – I’m back and I’m here to talk about the camera system in my upcoming Godot game based on the popular game, Vampire Survivors. Read the previous blog post if you want to learn more about my motivation around the game engine and project organization decisions.

So for this devlog installment I want to bring focus into the smooth camera system. Rather than just being a direct copy of Vampire Survivors, I wanted to add a few features to differentiate it – the first one being a camera that the player can control the zoom level on-the-fly, this was talked about in the last post.

Hey all–it’s been a minute!

Actually its been exactly 8 months since my last post about my gamedev journey. To be honest I’ve had an itch to work on my side projects for awhile now but work has just been way to busy that I lost the motivation to program after hours. After a much needed break I’m ready to get back into it.

Starting this year I’ve made the commitment to myself on regular blog updates and to re-ignite my deep-rooted gamedev passion.

Hey all, I’m Back! And today I’ll be writing a postmortem on an event I participated in a couple of weeks back. At the beginning of November, a colleague from the startup accelerator I’m a part of asked if I wanted to join a local Battlesnake tournament. I had heard of Battlesnake before but never gave it much thought and didn’t fully understand what all went into it.

For those who aren’t familiar, Battlesnake is essentially a competitive game of Snake where developers program their own bots (snakes) to compete for victory. There are countless resources you can use, but a good understanding of algorithms and probability is a must!

To begin, I’m a hobbyist game developer and I do not have professional training in this development realm.

If you’re new to my blog (welcome btw), I am a full-time software developer for a SaaS startup. During the day I mainly program in Dart using the Flutter framework, or sometimes Typescript if I’m venturing into the backend. While it’s undeniable that this hands-on experience in software development has its perks, transitioning these skills to the world of game development is a whole different beast. Gameplay programming and design are unique fields with their own intricate challenges.

purpose

I enjoy playing flight simulators and, during the build process for this adapter (June 2022) I was reeeaaaally into DCS World and MSFS 2020. Both of which, heavily rely on a rudder axis. I have a HOTAS system and the Honeycomb Alpha and Bravo peripherals, which are great. But I don’t, however, have any “professional” rudder pedals.

In my eyes I couldn’t justify spending $200-$300 CAD on a device that closely resembles my pedal system on my Logitech G29. Another issue is that my place is small and I’m already lacking space to store the devices I have now, let alone a separate rudder system.