I thought I wouldn’t be able to get much done this week due to my limited free time, but that wasn’t the case as I unexpectedly solved ‘Problem B’ last weekend after my traditional multi-hour ‘ultra-focus’ session. Instead of spending weeks on the problem as I initially feared, I took care of it in 2 days and fully unblocked the game’s development. There is still a lot more design work that needs to be done, but I see no major blockers on the horizon now (knock on wood).

I also finalized the work required for sending emails to the mailing list. Many people think they can just casually send emails to a large list of recipients, but this activity is highly regulated in the US and EU due to the negative impact of unchecked spam. I took care of everything I needed from the legal perspective, so I’ll start the email updates shortly — in early August, most likely.

With these things out of the way, I was finally able to start working on technical stuff! Galantrix has no work pipelines set up, meaning that I don’t have an established process for generating game assets. This might sound like red tape, but things are often more complicated than they initially appear… For instance, let’s say that I want to display geometric shapes on the screen in one of the game stages. Will these shapes be initially designed as 1) SVG files in Inkscape, 2) triangle meshes in Blender, 3) bitmaps in Affinity Photo, or 4) a list of vertex coordinates from Wolfram Alpha? The right answer here is ‘it depends,’ but I need to pick one of these methods — or another one I haven’t thought about yet — as the preferred approach for this and other situations. The choice is heavily influenced by what is easy to do in the game engine, Godot, and the capabilities of the available tools.

Godot is a very flexible engine, so there are a lot of different ways to approach a given problem. However, the wrong decision here could lead to bad performance, visual artifacts, or simply inefficiency in generating game assets. I spent some time playing around with different graphical applications and weighing my alternatives. I still need to do a lot more experimentation, but things are starting to become clearer. I expect to be able to make a few key technical decisions regarding the graphics soon.