First Screenshot Saturday of 2025 and I don't have much to show, really. I'm very slowly working on my rogue-esque project and at the moment I'm knee deep in hell designing GUI and making it work. In parallel I'm pandering about inventory/combat systems.
And for the last Screenshot Saturday of 2024, let me show you a "fancified" version of my current rogue-esque project. I added some of my fave post effects, which is very noticeable, but what is much less noticeable are two small enhancements: "pixel art" sampling shader to eliminate jagged lines from ASCII tiles (as seen in Karl Zylinski's video about using this shader in Odin/Raylib), and MSDF bitmap fonts that should look good no matter the scale and that are much more crisp and sharp than SDF (thanks to RedBlobGames who pointed me in this direction).
If you're gonna ask why did I bother with MSDF fonts just to smear it later with post-fx, the answer is "I don't know, don't call me out this harsh". :V
So I keep tinkering with my rogue-esque project. I added shooting animation, possible sparks animation (for now it's blasting all around the target, but it's purely for testing purposes) and screenshake (of course the one player will be able to either completely turn off or tone down. or, well, tone up, in this house we don't kinkshame). Also I added a very very early iteration of HUD just to see how it feels and stuff.
Warning: slight screenshake effect in gif
You've been spotted 
So now, when I finally have the level generator dealt with, I can focus on other aspects. Like, you know, enemies. Haven't done much, since I was mostly just fighting with local git instance today, but! I added an enemy and made this little ping animation for player to see that they've been noticed and enemy is now very interested in them.
Also, since I'm learning Odin in parallel, I've optimised rendering code a bit, got rid of multiple array iterations with the power of union types. It really is joyful programming. Not without its moments, of course, mostly with memory management, but it'll get better with practice.
Level generator MVP 
I finally finished working on the first pass of the level generator for my roguelike side project. Learned a lot about memory management in Odin in the process and optimised the process to the brim memory-wise.
Spent a lot of time today working on my roguelike thing. First and foremost I managed to make a scene system so I could separate scenes like gameplay scene, menu scene, test scenes etc. Had to do a lot of brainwork since it was a bit non-trivial, but I succeed. 
And right after that I ported first half of my level generation algorithm from Lua to Odin and ran a stress test on it generating 1 000 000 rooms like this to see if there'll be any memory leaks. Nope. Nothing. Another success. 
Now to make rooms more interesting and branching...
Added fade-in/fade-out effects for the tiles when they go into the light and back into the shadow. And because of that I also implemented a tween system in Odin which feels more like a forbidden dark magic rather than funny OOP that I wrote before for the same very purpose, really. 
Okay, using Odin and Raylib for gamedev purposes is as interesting as I thought.
So, I haven't yet achieved the success on using my toy stack lang (I thought I'll be calling it Stacklet for tagging purposes) for Advent of Code, but I added a lot of features to it today, like while-do, repeat-until, if-else-then, a lot of stack manipulation features.
At the moment I'm a bit stuck on the loops within custom functions, but I just need to handle them differently in my Lua runner (which is effectively will be me waving my hands around and screaming at goto statements :V).
Buttons? Check.
Buttons opening doors and raising walls? Check.
Double buttons? C h e c k.
Oh, just looking at all those buttons actually interacting with the level is so satisfying after me spending a solid hour yesterday trying to make them work. Hopefully, the architecture I came up with will allow me to add new mechanics without suffering too much (but I bet it will bite me in the butt later, for now it should be fine).
Finally I have something decent I can show for #ScreenshotSaturday! After few days of streaming on Twitch (which is, by the way, turned out to be a very productive tool for my game development adventure) I finally made some big progress on my game theGRIMOIRE_.
Now there's an animated background, walls are much shorter but still have depth, player sprite is now also animated and changed according to player's last input. I also replaced vertical doors with pits which not only solves the issue I had with them during jam (perspective is kinda not working for them), it also adds variety to mechanics/traps.
That and also character now moves continuously if the button is pressed, yet if you want to do the tap tap tapping, I also made this kind of movement snappy and fast.
So I ended up writing autotiling for theGRIMOIRE_ myself. It works great in LDtk, but not for my case. Turned out it was much easier to do it manually.
What you see below are screenshots from game. All those fancy walls are built by code, I only use tile data for floors.
Last screenshot is stress test of what I can do with this code. Not everything works obviously (not shown here), but I will fix stuff if it gets in the way of level-making along the way. For now my algorithm covers majority of cases needed for levels I already made (first three screenshots) and gives me some flexibility for the new ones.
(Follow-up to my previous post: https://peoplemaking.games/@0x0961h/113331505025162488)
I think I got it. I think I finally found the way I want player sprite to look. All in all it was a major blocker back in June, because for me "vertical slice" is fine and everything, but if I can't find the visual style I want to work with, mechanics won't "fill the gap". I know I will think about visual part a lot and it will bother me to the point of just not wanting to work on the game at all.
This style also should be alright for me to make sprites myself without having to seek for external help at least at this point.
Despite it being not that big of a thing, I consider it being a very big milestone. Yippie, ig.
Trying to understand if I want to change visual representation of the player character in Grimoire or not, but for now I can't really grasp the vibe. Or more like, I can't really find one that would be better than the original one (first pic).
2nd pic -- voxel model rendered to 2D from the post-jam prototype.
3rd and 4th are me playing with template characters from itch.io.
Thing is, I want player character to be, sort of, richer than the jam version's main character, however all my attempts so far just don't fit the vibe of the game.
Graphic design is hard.
using UE5 to make something beautiful with fancy PBR, Lumen, Nanite, MegaLights, Raytracing, RTX, DLSS 
using UE5 to make something in retro pixelated style 
My #LudumDare entry is finally done!
theSWARM_ is now available to play in browser on itch.io: https://0x0961h.itch.io/theswarm
New mission: Disarm (with timer) Multiple points on radar Wave text animations
