A Writer's journey into game development

 A year ago I couldnt have write this post. There was only one indie group worth to mention, ConWiro, and Vertex can not be considered indie, as it is a large team managed by a college and working with govermnent institutions related to movies industry. But seems that during 2019, many people, who are truly indies, were incubating, and blossomed during the quarantine. We have an ezine (or two) with gaming news, a Youtube channel, teams/people/projects like Kaytam, Luife, Krystapp, Reincarnated Souls, Juega Fast, and telegram groups specifically for cuban game developers. Of course, Havana, the capital, is the place were most projects are concentrated. It is a large city, with twice the population of the second city in the country (Santiago, where I live) and much more resources. Also, it is a place where people feels more attracted to try new things, while the rest of the country just follows the trend. Maybe it is the curse of being a small and poor island: the development and pro...

 Here is it! At last I have finished the long process of recording and editing. I apologize for the noisy background. And the second part: This is just the foundation to build you own, better AI system, based on Godot Resources, which are equivalent to Unity's ScriptableObjects. I have introduced a few changes to adapt it to my needs.

Yesterday I finished editing my second tutorial. Today I will polish the video, and record the second part. Will be available in a day or two. Stay tuned!

Took some effort and some of my sleep hours, but at last, I made it. Here is my first videotutorial: implementing an isometric camera in 3D, with Godot. Useful if you want to emulate the look of old classics like Fallout 2, but with some extra features. Considering that my voice is not so nice, and my english pronounciation is even worse, I also added texts to help you underestand what Im saying. You will also notice some background noise, but cant do anything to solve that. Any suggestion is welcome. Expect another tutorial soon.... or sor tof. This time, will be about my AI system.

Long time no see! Guess what, I have been working a lot on Godot and have a few results. Actually, more than a few. First of al, I managed to use the animations from Mixamo on my models. Not the optimal solution, but it works most of the time. There are a few glitches when using gltf, more glitches when using fbx, but the overall result is good for a prototype. The export/import is a bit messy lately, even in the stable branch. I have tested the process under 3.2 and 4.0. The most important advance is that I managed to create a basic item/skill system based on Resources. As I mentioned in my previous post, Godot Resources are the equivalent to Unity ScriptableObjects, thus, I have ported all things I previousy implemented. The items can be equipped, both weapons or armors (still have a serious issue with scale), though cant be used yet, and skills can be used on a target (with no effect yet). Last, but not least, I implemented the AI system using Resources for the logic blocks. It req...

Took me some time to discover that ScriptableObjects equivalent in Godot are Resources. After researching and asking a bit, I made a quick test last night that went surprisingly well. I wanted to test the OOP capabilities of GDScript, more specifically, if I could extend the Resource class for my own twisted and evil purposes, the same way I used ScriptableObjects in Unity. That is, to store items, skills, etc. It sort of works. Excuse me if I dont show any code, but Im still not sure that what I did was completely right and I dont want to point anybody in the wrong direction. But I do can show you at least this. Lets suppose I want to have my items stored as resources, so my first step was to inherit the Resource class: extends Resource class_name BaseItem export(String) var Id export(Resource) var mesh **** The base class contains all the info needed in all child classes, as usual. I can even store a Resource inside of another, in this case, the item mesh. Any item type in the game ...

Expect an isometric like camera tutorial soon! Or something like that, Im too newbie yet to make tutorials. Yes, Godot is rather limited in 3D, but I can restart my RPG project and learn all the stuff I need while the engine improves. The good news is that now, with the Epic Mega Grant, it will improve faster. I hope I can be using the Vulkan branch in april or may, even before first betas (much before). I have solved a couple of problems in the last week. First of all, I managed to use the terrain plugin with Navigation meshes. It takes a weird approach involving generating a mesh from the terrrain that can be quite complex and heavy, and then using it to generate the navigation mesh. So far, the perfomance in simple scenes sees to be normal, 60 FPS at 1080p, but I would be surprised if it werent so. I just confirmed that even when the perfomance is poor for modern standards, it is not plain terrible. Again, we should expect improvements in 4.0. Next week I will be posting some i...

 Yesterday I spent part of the night trying to confirm that I cant reuse a Mixamo animation in Godot in some simple way. In Unity the process, though not trivial, was quite easy. I simply could not accept that Godot, after so many years in development, would not let me use an animation external to the model. After looking at the editor, I tried the most obvious way: exported a model without animations and took my Mixamo generated FBXs containing the animations. To my surprise, if you export to FBX a model without animations, Godot doesnt imports it with a corresponding AnimationPlayer node, even if it has an armature. But if you export with the BetterCollada exporter it does include the AnimationPlayer, without animations, of course. With the model imported, there was no way to force it to use the Mixamo animations. But if you open the animations, you can use the Animation tool to save the animation data, and load it in your model. I did it! I thought. Well, I didnt....

According to Unity, due to embargo laws I can't use Unity, not even the personal edition. So, the last four years spent studying the engine are lost, for now, until the american embargo is over (not too soon, considering that Trump is going to be reelected and our government... is going to be reelected too). Yes, I could use it for some project inside my country, and maybe use some proxy company outside to distribute or sell games. Or even simply try and see what happens. What else is left? Well, a friend of mine kind of forced me to switch to Godot for a small 2D project. By the way, when I posted my previous post, I was still testing the engine. Now I can almost properly talk about it. This isn't the first time I play with Godot, in 2015 I checked it when I was testing several open source options to develop a little RPG we were working on. I liked that it was aimed in the right direction: a full featured engine oriented to productivity, with editor, one click deploy and feat...