ACBob's ZimZam - Blog In Memoriam; 2021
How the hell'd that happen.
Today marks the last day of 2021, a year that marked the second in the saga of illness that was 2020. I got... very little done in terms of this website, I only published one article (but with many unfinished and discarded plans for articles!) and a lot of my projects got canned. Of the fatalities, I'm decently sad about the books. They were promising, but boy is it a massive time sink to just... write.
My current plans are as follows;
- Farming Game (Unannounced)
- Meegreef
- Time Void (Unannounced)
- Animated Show (Unannounced)
But the most promising of these has to be Meegreef. See, I was a big fan of the game Minecraft, but in recent years I've taken to disliking the direction they've been going in. Sure, that's bound to happen when the development team for the game changes constantly over a decade, but I liked Minecraft, not the new Minecraft. Ya dig?
I've traced it down and it's not long after release 1.8 where the changes come to a point I begin to dislike them. The whole game in-fact just feels... off. It doesn't feel like what Minecraft is, it feels like a copy of Minecraft.
Enter Meegreef. My Minecraft copy. - Well, I say it's a copy, but that was only how it started1. Meegreef is my answer to everything I dislike about the new Minecraft. I'm taking inspiration from Minecraft of-course, but I don't aim to be it. In terms of actual game development, there's been very little if any... Just some testing assets slapped together in a quick proof of concept for the VoxelThingYeah Engine. Now I'm working on getting the Engine in a better state, and then I'll slap together some game play stuff and actually make Meegreef.
VoxelThingYeah is my realization I can actually do... anything. It's my biggest project, pulling together everything I've (somehow) learned over the course of the last 3-4 years. This means nothing to nobody reading this, but I've even impressed some people I look up to. Whazam. Bottom line is, VoxelThingYeah is my game engine and I'm gonna force it to make all my games2! Muahahaha!
For me, this year was filled with quite the roller-coaster of emotions. I simultaneously got a friend group and lost them, only to have them vilify me and shortly forget I exist. I also got a girlfriend. She's the pink character in the image you see. She's cute. European3, but you can't always win.
There's a lot to pack into just one article, a lot of it personal and to be honest, stuff I'd only really talk about with friends. Never-the-less, I'm going to achieve a longer read-time than last year. Eat that, Me!4
Looking at last year's article, in-fact, I talk about the farming game which is my dream game. With Meegreef on my plate, I've considered combining it into Meegreef, but I fear the Minecraft similarities are going to overshadow and destroy Meegreef's chances. However, I've still made progress. With the creation of my own engine, making the game should be a cinch.
I've copied some ideas from each of the engines I tried. The ConVar system from Source & Quake, the... resoundingly, actually nothing from Godot. I've even come up with a solution to the lack of animation for .obj, making my own damned format! That's right, BOBJ Is here folks! Soon enough, I'll extend it with bones and the such and even the BANIM File. ...Although I'll probably also support all the quake MDL formats too, for good measure.
I've even back-tracked on my previous disliking of the GPL. Over the past year I've gotten very much more political and the GPL aligns quite nicely with the direction I'm headed. Though, I generally try to avoid politics because some people tend to ignore everything and attack on a political basis. Still, I'm going to license VoxelThingYeah under the GPL v3 at some point, and distribute the source with any builds5.
My executive dysfunction hasn't gotten any better. Some might say I'm getting worse. I'm performing extremely poor in my academics, and there's many important things I'm neglecting. While my peers and family may suspect laziness, I'm not going to rule out a condition of some kind. It's not that I don't want to do XYZ, It's that I can't. The moment I bring myself to a task that I should do, I shutdown. My brain gives up. A task so simple as moving my arms can become impossible if I continue to try and force myself. Sometimes I can in-fact get out of it, if close to a deadline with no other alternative, but I'm miserable before, during, and after.
The tasks I can't do seem to line up with the tasks that are either too difficult, in the form of work, or something that doesn't engage me. VTY, for example, I managed to rack up 800+ commits in just under 4 months, climbing from a simple cube in space to a 'game' in less than 3. It clicked in all the right ways, something everything else seems to fail at.
For the past 6 months or so, I've been coasting away on life. Ignoring all the problems and issues that come, and simply hoping that I'll end up somewhere good. I haven't put much effort into anything and the ground I sit on is becoming shakier, but I've still been coasting. Truthfully, I'm scared what's going to happen and where I end up. But the moment I try to think of where to begin tackling it, my brain starts to shut down.
Speaking of, this article is quickly reaching that point. Oh dear! With that, I have to bring this article to a rather rushed-feeling close, but I want it out before next year. From me and Jim,
Piggybacking the Minetest engine under the name Bobcraft, It's quite poor quality.↩
Even if it requires me to drop Voxels entirely, and move on to something like brushes or mesh.↩
Much like I am!↩
I didn't actually accomplish this.↩
Including Steam releases, although they will have any proprietary elements such as API keys stripped because we all know how well that goes.↩