Updated website to dark theme and other stuff
The website and blog use a dark theme now. It's bothered me for a bit that the look and feel of my website isn't what I would choose for any other software I'd make, so that's fixed now.
Definitely been a slower couple of years for personal projects, which is to be expected as I've since graduated and been working full time and living on my own.
I got into modding worldbox, and the two mods I've made there are some of my most successful things I've ever made. Friendly Villagers has been downloaded 17,000 times on steam, and the now-obsolete Cultural Shift was downloaded 15,000 times. They're both pretty simple utility mods that alter a game mechanic to make the game more interesting for me. I had some ideas for bigger mods but I decided it would be better to just maintain these little ones and keep them up to date. I know I've gotten frustrated in the past finding a mod that looks good only to find out the author abandoned it, and I don't want that for my projects. I'm pretty sure my mods were among the first updated when the major 0.50 Monolith update dropped in June.
I started making a hex-based strategy game in Godot. I'd just watched the movie Civil War, so the theme was Civil War 2100. I've wanted to make a hex-based strategy game for a very long time. Pretty much since I first played Civilization V. I could never bother to sink the time in to learn how to make hex grids from scratch, but Godot 4 has that stuff built-in which kickstarted development. It would continue in short bursts as I got motivation for it. Currently it's just inches away from a minimum viable product. The game loop works, there's AI opponents that pose somewhat of a challenge, and it's pretty fun. It's also ugly as hell, full of bugs, and not quite a complete experience.
I want the game to have a much higher degree of polish than anything else I've made. It's always very tempting to skip polish because "well it works now doesn't it?" but the way a game looks and feels determines a lot of how fun and engaging it is. Brad Woods Digital Garden has a great interactive article on this. I also want to focus on moddability, as I have in past projects like Garfielf Blackjack. At a minimum I want the player to be able to swap out all of the cosmetic elements of the game, and ideally I'll include a level and unit editor on top of that.