Happy new year! What a busy December. Lots of office setup, everyone in the house getting sick, everyone in the house recovering from getting sick, holiday fun, oh -- and some game dev :)

In the November update, I roughed out two main goals for December --

1. Develop the basics for an AR-like navigation system in the game, and
2. Un-break my version control server, so that I can continue to back up my files and sleep at night.

Let's see how we did --

What got done?

#1: Navigation System

Waypoints and navigation are in! --

This is not a lot of animation work, but...it's more than I've ever done, so a) I'm super proud and b) there was quite a learning curve as things got more layered/complex. Animating the path lines in particular took a few different attempts before I found something that was easy to work with in-level, and didn't crush frame rates by doing things that (I have now learned) are unwise.

A few cases in point -- the first pass at animating the path involved creating a bunch of mesh components on the fly in real time, which it turns out is not a very performant thing to do --

Attempt #2 created all those meshes ahead of time and just rode their size/visibility during gameplay, but was full of math rounding errors because I don't math --

-- but after a few more nights of spit and polish, Attempt #3 was, as the adage goes, the charm --

These waypoints will eventually be used to play back story vignettes players unlock during the game, as they piece together the plot. For now, they are little more than a guided tour through the forest level. Enjoy? :)

#2: Version Control Repair

In the last devlog I mentioned wanting to migrate my version control system away from Phabricator (which is no longer in development) to Gitea. That remains the goal but was too involved to tackle in December. In the meantime, I found that Arch Linux (the distro my server runs) has a handy way to roll the whole system back to package versions from a specific date, which got me back to a working state at the expense of being able to update any packages beyond that point in time. That's not a great place to be long-term, but for the moment I'm up and running again, and can work the Gitea migration over a few months rather than tank game development completely to play sysadmin for weeks.

What got pushed off?

Navigation waypoints in the game will represent memories that can be played back. When a player approaches one, the waypoint should present an overlay of "metadata" about that memory -- date and time it took place, some sense of the memory's content, etc. I ran out of time in December to design and develop that, so it's currently on the roadmap for a couple months from now when I tackle more of the actual memory playback features.

In sysadmin-land, the aforementioned Gitea was effectively punted in favor of a band-aid.

What's next?

January will be a more minor update -- likely picking off a few spit-and-polish things that have fallen off the list over the past few months. We're already into the month a little ways, after all, and beyond that -- my wife and I are expecting our second child any week now! We're excited, and as you can imagine lots of time is going into preparations. I still want to hold to a new build of the game every month, it's just going to be a matter of finding the right set of tasks to tackle given the time.

Thanks as always to everyone taking the time to follow along and poke around! More soon.

-Tyler