Personal life's got in the way BUT GOING ON, -read up on the way Street Fighter II and Another World are built up, ported, etc. -checked out how to properly animate running/sprinting -kinda finalized one of the main protagonists (i think i did/said that at least five times already - well, working with concepts is working with concepts. Sculpting your first "big story" is no small task. Especially when everything was already done in fiction, a thousand years ago. "It's complicated" ...IT IS.) -began properly documenting related palettes -drew a ton of poses and NPCs -sketched up better logos -fixed bugs in the code (especially the "wall-latch then jump off")

After contemplating and reading up on various events and (non)encryption etc., I will be only releasing videos and no playable demo. I keep my development and editing offline, leaving a window only to my vague roadmap. When a person invests so much time and effort into something, they sure don't want to store it outside on the streets. ...I also very much hope this isn't my last project in my life as I feel I have a lot more to say and to give. While this is something "bigger", I see the video game form of my story as something fun (...at the end) which (hopefully) also brings bread to the table...

I so want to animate this thing already. Implemented (I like this word) multiple player characters and ability to switch between them. I am working out the tween/easing/soothing of the change of cameras which follow the little characters independently. Each character will move a little bit differently. I already have a good, verstaile stamina system, the characters energy use like, sprinting, jumping, falling down from large heights, dashing etc. take various amounts away of their energies. Aiming for a little bit of "real" feeling of it all, this way giving a serious undertone, while also keeping it all "actionable" and dynamic. And so it goes. Thank you for reading.

I have figured out how to implement keyboard and joypad control onto/into an existing inventory system. This was a "problem" and a need - since, all available templates and cases and demos are mouse only. Unacceptable. It is working well, will need a little debug but I did it. Some joy entered the scene as I am getting very familiar with anything within Godot, with GDSCRIPT and therefore I am kinda learning C(#++@?), which was on my personal "To learn" list. Yay. So, hoping to leap further again in progress after I got this total drag of an ass done now. I may even get to start animating and painting backgrounds "soon"... Yay and yay. Now what's next on the roadmap? ...

UPDATE!!! NEW NAME!! SMHS --> KSHV: KAOSHIVE Renewals. Again. I've made the harsh decision of going plain "2d side scroller" so to deduct a lot of extra work i am not familiar with / shorten the work process. I could draw the characters from a slanted top-down angle but animating all of them one-by-one in all directions would drain my time away into forever and make me think "if i do all this then why the hell not go 3D in the first place?" ...and if i go 3D then i want to animate hands... I mean, animating hands? (thinking of the required time and effort here) AND!! I want my characters to walk in certain ways. ...without motion capture that is just... close to impossible. So, anyway, managing a "from the side, only 2D animation"-based endeavour is way plenty on my plate. That said, I will try to make it seem the viewer is looking onto a 3 dimensional space. Title change. From "Smothered, Hard-Set" (which was a reference to the band Skinny Puppy and their songs "Smothered Hope" and "Hard Set Head") - the title/name has changed to KAOSHIVE - this is shorter and actually is descriptive of what I've written, what is laid out in the story. KAOS is a known word and 'hive' is I hope recognizable. Most humans know of bee hives. And chaos. Roadmap. I have a more comprehensive and accurate "roadmap" of my own which I share in its current form now: roadmap The code. I arranged my own structuring but I decided on using this template: UCC by Noasey. Thank you for your effort and sharing it, it helps to streamline many people's work, I am sure. And I follow some of the videos of MostlyMadProductions. Wonderful, quick, straight to the point instructional videos. Very good explanations. Thank you so much. While I do use these as a starter an aid for my project, I do write my own code. I modifiy and totally rewrite things and come up with new ideas and program and code it myself, just to be clear. Such as the stamina bar which is now intertwined with all player action, it drains and replenishes according to character movement. For now I am more than overwhelmed by problems in my life, as it seems usual and such for me but I pull this further whenever I can. I hope to come out with a demo as soon as possible. Thank you for reading.

Guess what...

Hi! Art first then text: As you can see, I am trying to narrow down what exact style of movement I want. (Got loads more but as much as I detest photo editing, this is also already 7MB in webp-format, which is heavy for a post according to me.) So, yeah, forget the pixel art... I will do all on paper first (especially in light of the AMAZINGFANTASTIC "renaissance" that is happening over the internet... (more on this later) - Not the backgrounds and effects for sure, those I will paint in Krita but the characters and props will start as ballpoint pen and graphite drawings. There are three "ready made" templates I plan on merging (and well, various other free assets are awaiting to be assimilated...) The important ones are: - the one I find most sophisticated and set for "proper" rpg needs, truly impressive to be sorted and tied all together by one very generous person: Cat's Godot 4 Souls-Like Template & Asset Pack - i will extract the vaulting and mantling and rope climbing from this one, but it is practically just a whole bunch of raycasts and license-problematic animations (...dude...), thought that climbing and "shimmy" over the corners are just too neat: Ledge Climbing In Godot 4 - Shimmy Turn and Ladder by Brokencircuit - and this, this one slams me in the face in it's simplicity and look, that negative light as a shadow (now, i haven't thought about it), how intuitive: https://github.com/golddotasksquestions/2.5D_isometric_pixelart_with_height by "golddotasksquestions" So... In my mind, the character(s) are "fully animated". Ideally I loved to make it like a living cartoon - otherwise I don't see much reason for this whole endeavour... THEREFORE - again, I call out for anyone who's interested in working with me. No idea what role, but obviously, I want to take art lead and this is my absolute passion project I am working on for more than a decade (if counting all forms). I need to paint out more stuff, to show what I is the ideal aim, I know. Yet I think the contours are here, I hope it shows. And narrowing down: Another World (dos game) + Kenshi (obviously not as vast) Third person 2D (in 3D, but all art on top is flat/drawn/painted). Ideal would be 3D for sure but I loved to see this done within the decade... Sorry for the compressed styel of writing, the heat here and my amazing life is taking the best of me. Thank you for reading. Have a great time!

Okay, so, it appears that modifying the camera and applying a 2d sprite onto the 3d template I mentioned took close to nothing. Camera follows fine, character actions and directions intact. Cool. I will dump a wall of art and some progress tomorrow. At least I did something.

I was thinking of the whole ordeal in a bad way, truly not in the right way. So, as I was requesting the delete of "the main game post" I made on the Godot Forums - just for kicks I decided to check on a certain template I was examining a few times, which one person was developing for a while, one that would've ironed out so many questions and problems for my non-programmer ass - and lo, BEHOLD, yes, they've just updated it... Ah, the amount of irony in my life, you wouldn't know... Yes, I It kept bothering me a lot. Yes, I've been drawing a lot... Merged and organized all my roadmap/plan/todo/howto text files into one and bottlenecked, squeezed and x-rayed the remaining important parts. Graphics-wise - I feel so stupid... pixelart, what pixelart? I could but I am no pixel artist, I excel in traditional freehand and in the transaltion of that to digital. Through the years, I just kept accumulating building blocks and elements, all this large, fat thing needs is a sharp hatchet or hammer and chisel... Also, this project helps me keep sane and going... I get depressed and anxious, as anybody else - but at times I consider just burning all I have. Injured my knee too, couldn't even walk for a week and I wasn't sure it will start healing, something I've never experienced as an adult. So, making some more art... I am some obscure white guy lost somewhere in Europe. The whole internet is f'd, majority of people take insane, obnoxious nonsense as bread and water and I do not even know how to connect with people. I can barely orientate on this sea of malevolent nonsense and I question my own thoughts. I couldn't be lonlier, maybe if I was truly lost at sea. On top of that I most often think video games are utter waste of time and something the world doesn't need at all. Zero ease. Nothing has value - at least not "out there", most things are taken as a bar of chocolate: ah, shiny, yum, throw, discard, useless. Passion, vision - barely alive. Horrid times, horrid, f'd times. And horrid people want to profit on and over it. I feel as if my compass is broken. What do you do in a completely mad world? Reach out to who? Have you catched that fantastic comment by that - "person" the other day? One being: "Maybe some jobs were not meant to be there in the first place." I truly can not say my actual thoughts and feelings about each and every person who does not think this LLM bullshittery is pure cancer. Rot of the mind. And I have that with multiple major things in life. The writing is on the wall, there are very facts we know for certain, yet the majority are setting the world on fire. WHY Release, man... I still refuse to take any drugs. My only vice is coffee. Yes, I know it only enhances this anxiety. Yet, why is that so, that I feel as a sane person in an insane world? What can I do? Drive it into art. Meditation and self-therapy seems to work, to be honest but only to a certain extent. Censoring yourself drives you crazy, fighting it back is tough. What kind of people encourage you to do that? What world tells you to keep smiling and obey? ... I don't hate people, I enjoy people but most of them truly put me off and make me want to leave the planet. So. Art. Artwork it is. Ratscock.

Sadly this goes back to the freezer again. Actually, I have decided this is not only going to a regular home freezer but into a hybernation chamber - until I bump into somebody who is willing to work with me on this. Developing a video game is a full-time or more like full-life commitment and I am unable to make that in the present or near future. ...Unless somebody dumps a million moneys on me, it is not happening. I am known to rotate between three outlets: visual art and traditional "crafting", music and singing and software programming. - Visual art (drawing, making little sculptures, arranging things) I can not stop, if my hands are tied I do it within my skull. - Programming and arranging things on the computer is how I try to escape the world around me and is absolute luxury (or irresponsible depression etc.). - Music is purely visceral and personal, it is a certain way I 'therapy myself' and ----- I am not able to explain but something I can do rarely and I am repairing my person in the present and foreseeable future. It is a time for that. In short, while I do have some available space and time to be creative, for various reasons I allocate what I have to making music now. There is an abudance of video games so the world is not exactly making a loss here. Hope you are all well in this crazy world. May the positivity of Mark Hamill be with you. Best regards, Richard 2024, May 4th

I have relocated to my home country for a while as I was facing depression and paranoia. I am okay and in a few weeks, and when I can squeeze time until, I will start posting again. +++

I redo the whole thing in 3D cause this template I started to build upon, the "25d demo template" is a !"#@**(^&*). Or at least a whole lot of extra work and confusing me altogether. [Edit: AAAAaaand looking into how tedious is it to rig and animate low-poly characters.] [Edit edit: It don't seem to be so scary but I first try a whole work-out in 2D with one character.] #godoting #gotgodot #gogodottodogood #godotingitoutgood

Started an entry on the official Godot Forum [forum.godotengine.org] if anyone else is godoting, the project is debatable over there.

A little background for this, a little bit of "about me", sorry, steering back towards the game in a second. Here is an "about me" / "what do I do" post from my personal blog which I retired. It opens in a modal over this blog. I come from a working class background with close to nothing to rely on but myself. Yet, at one point of my life I had the choice to start the process for applying to an arts university (in London, UK) but seeing graduated students work and "what they gained", I in the end chose not to go that route, to "just mess around and figure life as I go". Life went on, I have made some good decisions and some smaller bad ones and, particularly, one huge mistake which stands out sharp: it turned out, not properly applying for settlement in the UK really messed and is still messing my life a lot. A way too much of a lotso lotta lot. Being a semi-rootless immigrant is not a fun life. Anyhow. I consider myself a craftsperson, not a real artist cause I have real interest in all forms of visual and physical art, including writing and dancing too but not a very defined direction among them. I indeed dance around and among. I make it as I go. So. Not much to stand on and a troublesome mind and background still has me in a curios uhm setup in life. And I am at a point where I can not lose more. Rather, I hold on to anything I have to stop myself from falling down. Like this little project. So what? So I do this and almost everything in life alone-alone by myself in short. Nevertheless, if you'd be interested in working with me, here is a page to look at: https://richardkramen.com/form/ That's all. Thank you for reading. Respect and love one another. Back to sword-fighting robots and games and such!

Hello again! To get back on track with programming in GodotEngine properly, I went through a few things: So, it all based on the 2.5 Godot (3.6.3beta) template, mixed 2d and 3d elements, as it allows to use "simple" animation, show a lot and have the capability to utilize engine physics, gravity and overall "3d capabilities". I would of course loved to model and animate the whole thing with rigged bodies and so on but keeping it "flat" is what I have time for if I do not want this to take forever-forever. Hopefully in the future there will be a hospitable planet to live on... and I will be able to continue to create more, maybe a 3d sequel. Anyhow. Before I get to the actual fun part of it all, drawing characters properly, animating them, drawing backgrounds, making props and interactions, I must get through with the "boring" coding part. Fortunately, thanks to the vast busy-busy community this game engine attracted, the resources are plenty and I do not have to figure out everything on my own, amazing people share their work and discuss their troubles on forums and all in all, this is a superior software to work with. Yay. Here is a list of most things I've done apart from the "old code". Will upload a video soon and then some silly pre-alpha to mess with. I decided to disclose my actual roadmap [it is still heavily cropped for brevity], see it at the bottom, after the posts: Roadmap ⌁ Created off-screen point-of-interest indicators by merging two different sources and then managed to fix and trim it down to about 50 lines. Now it all works as expected. ⌁ Got a placeholder parallax background for clouds/depth. ⌁ Drew the rough animations for the first own character, walks, falls and jumps in 8 directions. ⌁ Fixed unwanted sliding of the player again: after about three hours of coding i realized i just need to adjust a slider. ⌁ Experimented with a logo idea, worked it out it in Inkscape. ⌁ Created a transparent boot splash, when the game loads, there is a neat semi-transparent logo popping up, and did some icons for files and folders. ⌁ Discovered this spatial/panning audio function: the sound pans left or right depending on where the source is on the screen. ⌁ Added a screenshot function I am at a dilemma, a problem where I have to decide to go with just a single-player mode or introduce and take on building a multiplayer option as it would make great sense according to my "story" and beyond. There will be party/team-based gameplay either way. Keeping simple but not too simple. Thank you for reading.

Just a few more images. Photo from 2020: Figuring how the character avatar/hud should look. This is too distracting but looks cool, would take a few shaders: I think I go with small eyes for this character: