Kind of surprisingly I’ll actually be making a post not about hardware. Right now there are a few things for hardware that I want to mess around with. I want to dual-boot windows and elementaryOS on my Thinkpad x240. I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB that I’m not doing anything with. And I want to move more of my VPS’s to host from home to, but that is not the point of this post.

The point of this post is to get organized for 2021. And we’re already into February, which shows how much time flies. But all of the more reason to get organized. So this year, I’m going to list-up the things I want to focus on.

1. Making a Shump – I tried making a shump in college, and it was a painful experience trying to find anyone to work with on it. Now I have a better idea of the process and a better idea of how to commission art to get it done. So I think I can draft out the game, draft out the design, break up the design into individual elements. Create a draft and simple placeholders for all of the elements, either using existing assets, or my own art as a placeholder. And the commissions the assets that will replace the placeholder.

For writing the actual Shump, I’m thinking either SDL or Godot. Though even something like Game Maker Studio might be an option for a (hopefully) simple 2D game.

2. Megaman Legends Assets – For Megaman Legends 2, I finally got my hands on the function to decompress textures. Which means that in addition to the models and animations, I can now add textures to the models. The issue is still going to be matching which textures, to which models get loaded into the game, but I can make debug tools or try to make that process either. Or the likely option is that I could bitch-out and make another save-state viewer.

But I also still need to grab the meshes for the Megaman playable character and start looking into some of the stage models. It’s a ton of fun, and I love reverse engineering games, it’s just time consuming. So we’ll see how much I’m able to focus on digging into the files this year.

3. Dash Model Format – This is actually a big one. And I really want to spend time getting Godot support, revisiting Blender imports and start on exports. And then maybe get into something like Metasequioa. There’s more documentation to be done, and I should start posting videos, or maybe make some reddit posts about it, so I can either start gaining some traction, or gain some more criticism. Focusing more on the JSON format for Javascript and Python, combined with a utility to convert to and from Binary for C and C++ programs might be a better way to go about managing the format from here on out.

4. GTK Model Viewer – The last thing on this list is the GTK model viewer. I think writing a simple model viewer using the GTK GL Area would be good practice, and a fun project to work on. I think I can start by making some sketches on what I want the layout to be, followed by an HTML mock up. I think the focus on this would be to make a Noesis-like application in Linux. Which is why I would like to name this program Gnosis (the GNU – Noesis). I long term goal would be to try and make some animation editing tools, but that would be really getting ahead of myself thinking about that too soon. For now, if I can get the layout, get a grid and get a simple model loaded, then I will be really happy.