SQYD.studio

Hello anyone! Oh no! I didn’t post a dev blog for two whole weeks. Sue me*. I’ve been trying to follow that advice: “you should avoid skipping a habit your trying to form twice in a row.” I’m just going to move the goalpost and pretend the advice is “don’t miss a habit three times in a row.” That way, I can let myself off the hook. I’ve been practicing my self-compassion.

So what have I been up to dev wise? Still working on our new goblin controller up until May first, see my last postfor more. Since, we’ve pivoted to cleaning up BACKFIRE for release on Steam, and re-release on IOS and Android later this summer. That’s also going well, but it’s mostly UI work which I don’t love, and thus- don’t want to blog about today.

So what can I blog about? How about this post from back in February: Someday? How are those side project going? As it turns out, when an idea gets in my head I have a hard time letting it go. So pretty well. Possibly to the detriment of the things I’m supposed to be doing, but whatever. Here’s the quick rundown:

1. Become a Linux Dude – Done. I’m dual-booting Ubuntu and haven’t loaded up Windows 11 for months. Some growing pains getting my Unity environment setup, but since then it’s been running smoothly. I’m being guided though the terminal with the help of The Linux Command Line, an awesome free book. It’s good fun. I still use Windows 11 at work, and I’m increasingly convinced it’s just spyware pretending to be an OS.
2. Git Good – “Good” is relative. I’m by no means a git expert, but I think I’ve got the basics of the version control software under my belt now. I can git init, add, branch, commit, push, fetch, and merge with the best of them. I’ve got my GitHub profile setupand connected to my PC with ssh. Next steps here would be to a) contribute to a public repo, and b) publish a repo of my own.
3. Rust Curious – To be honest, I think I’m on the path to becoming Rust Obsessed. Been reading the Rust Book over my morning coffee. I’ve written a few little learning projects, mucked about with an experimental UI library, and I now know enough to know that I like programming in Rust. I was originally drawn to it while trying to get my head around the Unity ECS (entity component system). From where I sit, it seems like there are a lot of similarities between Unity’s DOTS tools and how Rust syntax is organized. A highly structured, classless, nullless, non-garbage collected, high-level language with low-level performance? Sign me up. I’m definitely going to keep learning. Whenever I get around to publishing a repo it will likely be a Rust project**.

That’s a lot in three-ish months. I’m kinda just realizing that I may be making more progress on my side quests than my main ones. It do be like that sometimes***. Nobody has ever told me I’m good at prioritizing work. I want to refocus myself on our game dev (which, to be clear, I have been working on) but I also want to keep learning cool new things.

I think my plan is to try to stuff the side-quests into Saturday afternoons. The routine would be to do my morning thing, draft/edit/post this blog, then spend my afternoon learning whatever. That would give me Sundays, Wednesdays, and evenings to focus on game dev. I imagine whatever I pick up on my adventures in codespace I’ll be able to bring back to my work in Unity. Repressing the gremlins that live in my head seems like it would be bad for my mental health. I’m quite good at the things I want to do- and if I don’t do them I’ll spend all my time thinking about them anyway.

All this to say that I’m going to write a little dice roller app in Rust this afternoon. You can’t stop me. I’ll be back to untangling BACKFIRE UI tomorrow, and I’ll probably blog about that next week. Thanks for reading. Until next time.

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* Please don’t sue me. This blog is to be read at your own risk and with the full understanding that it’s going to be a rambly, inconsistent mess. SQYD.studio is to be held harmless of any psychological damage, emotional harm, or loss earned of wages resulting from this blog’s content or lack thereof. Please consult your doctor before reading if you present any of the following symptoms: sensitivity to typos or improper use of English grammar; a desire for well-structured written content; adverse reactions to tangential asides, parenthetical statement, footnotes, and/or nested lists; and/or an allergic reaction to meta-humor. By reading you acknowledge this blog may cause lasting damage to the structure of your brain- albeit far less than an equivalent time spent on Facebook.

** And I’m absolutely going to dive into Bevy someday…

*** All the time.