Dev Log - ProjectHack.net game development this week

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the PW podcast. This one is another devlog. This one is all about my project hack game. So this is a game development devlog.

If you're curious about the game at all, you can go to projecthack.net, and you'll see it there. It's rather old page. I need to update it. This week, I decided it was time to start the build for version two. Now there's a long history with this game.

This game actually, for me, goes back many years, but it's one of those it's a game that I wanted to play that I wanted to exist. And I won't go into all the details about the game in this episode. If you go to projecthack.net, you'll get the idea there. But it's an idle game, desktop, mobile, all those kind of things. And I built the version one quite a while ago now, and I used for those who are curious, I used the Unity engine, and I'll talk a bit about some decisions on this new version.

I decided that it was time to start the build. Now I have spent a long time working out some ideas and lots of different little prototype projects for different little bits and trying different engines and all these things before I decided to dive in with the version two. Now the key thing with the version two is not only is it a complete rebuild, but it is also the multiplayer version that I always wanted to have exist. And the first version was just a single player, and I'm still not convinced that I know how to do the multiplayer version, but, hey, that's part of the challenge. Right?

Anyway, past week, I have had phenomenal progress with it. And interestingly, the part that I wanna share here for those of you who are curious, in a lot of these game engines, you can do visual script, they call it. Right? In Unreal Engine, it's called Blueprints. In Unity, it is just visual scripting.

And in Godot, for example, is visual scripting. And I'm sure many other engines too. Now when I did the version one, I used Unity, and I used a Flow Canvas plugin. It's a paid plugin, which is fantastic, by the way. And I did it with visual scripting.

And towards the end, it got to be very frustrating because it hindered me in some ways. So this time around, I decided we're not doing any of that. We're gonna use c sharp, which in itself is a journey because I had not written c sharp in a long time, and we're gonna do it with code. And it has made a fantastic difference, not only to performance, but also to the speed at which I can make things because, basically, I needed clearly a couple of years of not working on this project and learning different parts and trying different bits to discover better ways to do things. Now, for example, a lot of you developers out there are probably familiar with things like the observer pattern, right, where basically you have something that sends out a signal and a lot of other things are listening to that signal and they react accordingly.

And this is a way of doing things without having that hard coupling and dependency in code, which in games can be a nightmare, especially if it's an idle game where there was a lot of UI and a lot of math because that's mostly what the game is. And therefore hooking up all these things and maintaining those connections gets to be very difficult and very frustrating. And by using this newer system approach that I'm using with c sharp actions, It enables me to decouple those and have different parts of the UI respond to different things, and the ones that don't need to care about things don't do anything, so that's a performance boost. But it also enables me to write this version in a very modular way. So I have rebuilt a lot of the game already in about a week, whereas doing it with visual scripting took me, oh gosh, I don't know, months previously.

And these videos on my YouTube channel you'll see there. Again, just search for Peter Widom or go to PeterWitham.com. There's a link. And you can see the progress that I made with the original version. But, anyway, this week was all about getting back to the project, and I needed that time away to really understand how to do this kind of game better.

And it's paid off massively. Yeah. Okay. You know, it's still frustrating that I have been wanting this game for years, and it's taken me a long time to figure out a lot of things, but that's part of it. Right?

This is a project that I wanted. Other people have played it too and seem to enjoy it. But primarily this is a thing that I wanted to have exist. So there was no timeline pressure other than the frustration for me and maybe some others that, oh my gosh, it's just not out there. But the multiplayer part is gonna be difficult and the multiplayer part required a lot of thinking and still does.

That's what I've been working on this week. I can dive into details in future episodes, but the takeaway here is visual scripting and all that kind of stuff is fantastic for prototyping. And a lot of folks swear by it. I got no problem with that. But for me, prototyping is it is very useful for that.

But when it came down to it building the game, it proved to be more of a hindrance for me and much more of a management nightmare for things like, I say, code and and all that kind of stuff. I went back to scripting with c sharp in this case, in air quotes, conventional programming, I guess you could call it, and it's really paid off for me. And it also helps massively with tracking changes in source control. For example, I'm using Git. Right?

So I'm committing code files as opposed to blueprints and visual scripting. So I can now see the changes over the history of that timeline significantly easier right there in the web browser for the git history on GitHub or whatever, and you just can't do that with visual scripting really. So it's been really great, and I'm super pumped. I have been trying to enforce myself a rule of working on it every other day. It has worked out fantastically, sometimes many days in a row, and that's great too.

And the fact that I can now do this with the scripting means I can work on various parts and then bring those modules in as that part of the game is ready to go. It's just been a really good, fun, and educational week for me on this, and I still got plenty of decisions to make. I'll talk about those again going forward. But that's it for this devlog. I do need to get back to some other apps and make some updates there.

I have said before in previous episodes, when you have that motivation to move a particular project forward and you're all about that, it's good to embrace it while you have it because it probably won't last forever, and then you can switch back to another project. So that's it, folks. Again, go to PeterWitham.com if you wanna reach out to me, or go to projecthack.net where you will see an old one page for the website where you will at least see a screenshot and some of the feature ideas in there. The links for the beta versions don't work anymore. I don't believe they do on there, but I will be releasing new betas once I get to a point that I think I want people to experience some of this.

That's it. Speak to you in the next episode.