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Day 001: Hello world.

My order is on the way so i thought i'd start this challenge by playing around with the Playdate (an indie handheld game system) and their SDK.

So i've made a small hello world example using the Odin language (via their C API) and i'll keep going from there for a couple of weeks and see where this goes, nothing huge planned for now

If anyone is curious, here is the hello world code: https://github.com/colinbellino/playdate-odin-hello-world

Day 002: Deep dive into the Playdate SDK, reading hardware specs & design docs, code hot reload.

Not a lot of visible progress today, but managed to implement a basic code hot reload feature so i don't have to reopen the simulator every time i change some code. Slowly but surely getting back into it ^^

Related links:
- Designing for playdate: https://help.play.date/developer/designing-for-playdate/
- C API: - https://sdk.play.date/2.0.3/Inside%20Playdate%20with%20C.html

Day 003 (1/3): For the past few months i've been working on my own game engine that fits my very specific needs: small, 2d games, mainly pixel art, low level language (odin & c), etc
The goal is to learn as much stuff as possible for the engine side, and be able to then make all my future games in a codebase i own myself (i don't plan on making it public).
I should be able to start working on that full time in the following weeks, so this is exciting

Day 003 (2/3): The platform and rendering layers are "good enough for now" ™ so i started working on recreating of my old jam games (https://colinbellino.itch.io/snowball) in the new codebase. The game is a very simple tactical RPG so it's a good fit (not too big, not too small).

Day 003 (3/3): Today was spent mostly coding some battle systems like a turn order for the units and starting to prepare stuff for player movement and targeting. Trying to think of a better control scheme that works well with mouse, keyboard and gamepad.
I still have a good chunk of my day tweaking the engine more than the game code, but that's the point: dogfooding so i can make it better for myself later.

Day 004: Didn't get much time to work this week but i'm still working on the battle systems.

Today was move/cast range and some code underneath to search/filter tiles with some conditions.
Also added more dev tools and in game cheats so i can test this stuff quickly while still implementing real constraints (like valid targets for abilities, range, etc).

Day 005-006: Not much gamedev done, mainly debugging/fixing bugs and working on animation system (easing between values, changing sprites, etc).

Day 007: A couple of hours implementing the logic to a bare-bone animation system and some debug UI for it.

Day 008: More animation code work.

Also updated my editor theme and fixed some memory leaks in it. Color scheme "totally not stolen" from Isa's IMGUI config in https://github.com/isadorasophia/murder

Day 009: I now have working animation for sprites and colors and with different easing methods.

Next i want to animate transforms (position, scale & rotate) but i'll probably want to change how my entities are stored if i want the parent transforms to affect their children But that's a problem for future me!

Day 010-011: Plug the animation system with my entity system so i can animate units. Animation works for color, scale, position and sprite/texture, still haven't done rotation because i'm not sure i actually need that.

Still chipping at the project 1 hour at the time, I can't wait to be able to spend more time on this haha.

Day 012-013: Making the animation system work on units and plug that into the battle system to have some (very) crude unit movement. The pathfinding isn't plugged in and the animations are obviously placeholders, but hey, it's progress

Day 014-015: Fixed some rendering issues, memory leaks, and upgraded DearImGUI to the "docked" branch.

Day 016: Updated the engine to allow nesting transforms components into their parents so i can scale/move only the parent (unit) and have the children (hands) scale and move accordingly.
Also got back to unit walk animation which i'll be able to showcase here soon.

Day 017: Lost half the day trying to open a 2 years old Unity project because everything that could go wrong, did just that (multiple crashes, asset references lost, bugs, missing packages, etc). Finally got it running after 3 hours of madness.. I do not miss working with Unity haha.

Rest of the day i spent working on my server, slowly starting to move my git projects to it because i don't want to depend on Microsoft for that anymore...

Day 018 (1/2): Investigated a memory leak in one of the libraries i am using, i think it's probably me doing something really dumb in my DearIMGUI or Tracy calls haha.
So i'm putting tools in place to track allocations that are done in C/C++ libs (everything is already tracked and budgeted in my Odin code) and hopefully i'll report back on this tomorrow

Day 018 (2/2): I wanted to spend more time on the actual game and less on the tools but i'm thinking long term so i have to resist and make sure i make the tools i need along the way. I'll get there ^^

Day 019-022 (1/2): was sick for the last week or so but managed to get some work done here and there.

Managed to integrate Tracy (frame profiler) with my tools so i can track cpu usage and memory usage of my arenas. Right now i have just two memory arenas (one for the engine and one for the game data), but that will change soon as i add more game systems. And a small one for scratch data, that i clear at the end of the frame.

...

Day 019-022 (2/2): While doing that i found some issues on my architecture and managed to fix a lot of them, but at that point i have to resist very hard not to spend too much time rewriting it again.

Should be back on game systems tomorrow if i'm well enough to work, i have more work to do for the units movement animations

Here is what it looks like in tracy (https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy), highly recommend this frame profiler.

Day 023: Spent some time moving the animation system to the engine code and make a simpler API.
It's not much but that allowed me to prepare some stuff for the next step which is: to chain unit animations (walk, climb, jump, change direction, etc) and loop/repeat them when needed.

Day 024: More animation work. I updated the system to be able to easily queue animations and wait for them to complete (ie: during battles and cutscenes).
It's not looking great because the path finding isn't plugged in yet and i'm still using placeholder animations, but the code is there at least.

Also, I had to spent half the day fixing my work environment (OS and editor :/) because it's one of those days where everything decided to fail... *sigh*