Practice game 2 - called finished.

So I called practice game 2 finished. This was the space invader clone I was working on.

I say called as it wasn't really finished. I had a few game enhancements to do and a reasonable amount of polish to add. I hadn't added support for game controllers, sound effects,  or building for the web.

I did add an entity system, bitmap graphics, animations and improved the event system. Build times where pretty quick full rebuild less than a second. The need for graphics meant learning a little aseprite along with writing a script for packing together the results onto a sprite sheet.

The animations where described in a text file. I would like to put all game constants in a text file and have them updated whenever the file is saved. There is a ton of other little improvements to be  had.

While I could have hacked together a space invader clone very quickly, the goal of practice it to learn and improve. Hence some experimentation and trying to do things in a way  that could be reused in game three.

While I would have liked to have published the game on itch.io doing a web build just didn't quite make it. It will be on the list for the practice game three. It won't be top of the list as I am still focused on practice rather than production.

I am also taking a month break before starting on game number 3. In part because I plan on running a half marathon and want my mind to focus on the final stages of training. I  have been injured a fair bit and have not been able to train.

The real reason is I want to have a month of geek. That is massively improve my work environment. Having a single script to update nvim, aseprite and a texture packer all of which I build from source. I have a mental list of many other little improvements and I plan on putting them into google docs the moment I publish this post.

I also want to revisit the Rust language. I looked it it earlier in the year and was put off by its slow compile times. They seem to be improving. The realisation that a huge amount of game dev is tweaks that can be dynamically reloaded makes me a go a little easier on  the Rust build times.

So a month of geeking around is ahead of me.

I am also considering switching from  coffee to green tea for my caffeine hit. Just to see if there is any difference. My coffee consumption has been quite high recently.

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