Blaugust

So Blaugust is very similar to NaNoWriMo where a bunch of people who have independent blogs try to get out a certain number of articles. And my original goal was to hit the 10 article goal. I’m ready to call it a bust with 8 days left. Mainly that’s due to how frickin busy I’ve been these last few weeks. So maybe in the spirit of not completely giving up, I wanted to write this article on why I failed.

I’m going back on a lot of things

So I’m returning in many different ways to things I’ve done before. And this is for various reasons.

Back to school

A scene from the movie Billie Madison where Adam Sandler is pacing and saying the words, 'Back to school. Back to school. To prove to dad I'm not a fool'
A scene from the movie Billie Madison where Adam Sandler is pacing and saying the words, 'Back to school. Back to school. To prove to dad I'm not a fool'

Yeah I’m going back to school so I can have a proper Software Engineering degree for my resume. Especially with the rise of automated filtering, literally the title is almost necessary unless I can network my way in. So for the eventuality that I want to work at a company that I can’t talk my way into, I want that pretty little piece of paper (Arguably it’s kindof a big piece of paper but you get my drift. Right? Please!?? Please take ittt).

I’m taking accelerated classes while working fulltime. So in short the next few years of my life are probably gonna suck. But I’ve been trying to find small gems of joy. Like flirting on social media (hey cutie~) and working on my various creative endeavors (oh wow like this very blog? And also some games but I haven’t published an actual game in years now).

Back to … Godot?

A stick figure with the godot logo for a face dancing as the text reads 'let's godot' which is a play on the phrase 'let's go' because they sound similar
A stick figure with the godot logo for a face dancing as the text reads 'let's godot' which is a play on the phrase 'let's go' because they sound similar

Yeah so turns out I really couldn’t be assed to manage windowing, rendering, and scene structuring myself. So the SFML based game idea is going straight to the trash (I never made a blog post about it LOL). Though if you are curious how far I got I did make a repository for the code. It should run just fine.

But what I found is that the current most robust engine for rendering, windowing, scene structuring, and in general making games with C# is… Unity? Fuck that I’m using Godot.

So if you aren’t familiar (somehow? Goddam how’d you get here??) Godot is a fucking awesome open source game engine that has its own scripting language called GDScript but every version of the engine has an alternative .NET version which allows writing C# code instead. So I can hail back to literally my most popular game I’ve ever made, The Ascension Of The Lamb, which I made using Godot 3 way back in the day.

A huge plus since I’ve been gone is that Godot is updated to a more modern C# version as of Godot 4.4, which enables a ton of timesaving tricks like the “with” syntax.

// Before
var temp = GodotVector;
temp.X = NewValue;
GodotVector = temp;

// Now
GodotVector = GodotVector with { X = NewValue};

Now the reason I wanted to work with C# instead of Rust is because I’ve been advised by some coworkers that it would greatly improve my ability to find a job. And frankly, I want to make games that my friends can play. Not all of my friends have computers with dedicated graphics (which Bevy basically requires AFAIK). My main basis for this is that my laptop is a total shitbox interesting AMD chipset for integrated graphics that even AMD struggles to support. So somehow every time I boot it up there’s an 80% chance the Linux Mint installation will not recognize the GPU and I’ll be stuck with LLVM-pipe, which sucks so much ass in terms of performance bc the CPU isn’t all that strong anyway.

Back to potato

So I also want to ensure I make games that can run on low end PCs that only support OpenGL. Maybe someday I’ll look into pure software rendering? But unless someone specifically tells me that it’s necessary, I prefer the convenience of OpenGL and the GLSL shading language. And so Godot (as of like version 4.4 I think) will automatically fall back on OpenGL instead of strictly requiring Vulkan. Which means for PCs that support it, they can zoom. But weraker PCs should still be able to play the game, likely at a slower FPS than that of Vulkan.

Back to the blog

Oh yeah so if you’re reading this anytime after publishing, yeah I’m back on writing stuff for the blog. I wanna get into a better habit with this blog. In fact I’ve already had someone messaging me to fix some broken RSS links on my site. Which was kindof annoying because Zola (the static site generator I use) theoretically checks links when it builds and fails if any of the links are dead. But I guess if I do templating code it does not offer that safeguard. I should have assumed that but I didn’t. Ope.

I’ve got a couple things I’ve thought of (some I’ve even done already!~)

  • Relocate blog to Codeberg based hosting to get off of GitHub’s AI scraping hellhole
  • Purge as much JavaScript from my website as possible
    • I’m now considering JavaScript running on this blog to be a bug. And I’m slowly purging different embeds from legacy pages as I go.
  • Reorganize blog to enable extra interests of mine
    • I’ve gotten back into creative writing. And some of that I’ve published on this blog in the Stories Section
  • Spruce up my portfolio with newer things like SSBS and such
  • Make another game to finally have made a new game
  • (Still Undecided) Change the “meta” section to “personal”
    • Currently it’s called “meta” because it’s supposed to be metatextual articles about the blog as a whole and what I plan to do with it. However I really just talk about myself and what’s going on in my life here, so I figure a rename may be warranted.
  • Finally get an email “comment” on my blog?
    • Oh wait that’s on your todo list isn’t it ;D

What I’ve been up to

I talked above about creative writing. I actually have a book that’s self-published out there already. It’s only sold to family members for now. And I realized I really shot myself in the foot using my actual name as the author instead of a penname because I’d feel comfortable promoting it on my online channels if I had used a penname! So for now I just write short stories and I’m hoping to finish a shorter novel or two someday (maybe they’ll be novellas IDFK).

Spicy Time

So if you checked out my stories section you may have noticed a fun little “🔞” on one (or more) of those stories. That’s because I’ve been playing around with writing erotica. And apparently it’s not half bad. I’ve also heard from some friends that it’s “surprisingly wholesome given the subject matter and genre.” which I’ve elected to decide is a compliment on my writing ability and not myself just being a big old vanilla softie who likes missionary and hand-holding.

My Life Is Like A Video Game Romance Novel

Yeah so turns out I’m poly? And I now have two adorable girlfriends who treat me so well. And one of those relationships is relatively fresh so I’ve been struggling to muster the desire to work on my usual pile of projects when I could just be flirting with a girlfriend instead? I’m like, super duper gay NGL.

All work and no play makes Squiggles a dull fae

I’ve been working a ton. Specifically in order to fund my schooling, pay off my studen loans from my previous degree, and also keep up with basic costs of living despite still living with my parents. With my current income, the choice was paying debts or living independently. And not getting a bounty hunter chasing my ass sounded like a good plan.

This does mean I’ve been stealing joy where I can usually in the form of watching dumb YouTube videos. Cuddling my more local girlfriend (long distance sucks and I will beat Palkia’s ass about that). And sometimes having the energy to work on a project.

A Successful Failure

All in all, the “participation” in Blaugust was good for me. It encourages me to really focus on my blog. Unfortunately 99% of the work on my blog has been things like adjusting the CSS and templating, or adjusting structure of articles and feeds. Fixing various bugs like HTML not being properly escaped in feeds and dead links thanks to auto-formatting affecting hard-coded links.

So yeah I sure as fuck didn’t hit that 10 article goal. And with my only articles in the backlog being two smut stories and maybe a post about my current long term game project JKTD, I could just maybe push out a few moere articles to be just shy of half my goal. But I have to return to my reason for this blog. I blog because I want to. Because I enjoy writing out my thoughts and ideas and sharing knowledge with people in a freely accessible way. Rushing to finish wouldn’t leave me with anything that I could be proud of. So I won’t.

That being said, yes I have stories on the backlog. And I’m even considering posting singlet chapters and snippets from larger story projects. Like a YA dystopia/utopia novel (i.e. not smut) focused on interpersonal relationships and desire inspired by my frustration with RWBY’s writing. Or a story about an atheistic catholic priest who’s haunted by a terrible past in a supernatural horror mystery story. Which is partially available on my ScribbleHub.