Game Off 2023 Journey

Published at Nov 01, 2023●Updated at Dec 02, 2023●21 minutes read

This blog post is my journey into Game Off 2023 by Github and Lee Reilly, started on November 01 and ended December 01. It's my very first big game project, I am so exited! I will update this page every day, telling what I did and the expectations to the next day.

Day 01

I was so excited to participate. I remember only making one game in Javascript very simple, three or four years ago, I think using P5, It was a runner game, like the Google's Chrome Dinosaur Game, very nice, but I think something more complex.

This day was the great theme reveal, which was Scale. It was very nice, very embracing. The first moment I thought in making something like Cuphead, a boss battle rush themed as pirate or other theme related to sea that I can fit scales.

Print showing Game's Off Site Scale theme description — Game's off 2023 theme

Thinking more about, a boss battle rush would be very difficult for my first game because I need to create a lot of mechanics, and in one month maybe it's not possible. So I decided to go to scale, an increasing stuff. I thought in games like Vampire Survivors, a bullet hell game. Maybe I cannot do a lot of enemies variations, but I think I will go if this.

Day 02

This day I was searching for a game engine. As I only code one game, I do not have an expertise of how game engine is better for my choices, so I take a time to study some of the engines recommended in the Game Off 2023 page. I started in Unity, It's a very good engine to design first games because it's simple and intuitive.

I also look at Unreal, with a very good lighting system and incredible stuff to handle 3D games it's probably the best engine out there for someone trying a next gen game, but for me that is my first game, and will probably be a 2D game, Unreal would be kill a mosquito with a bazooka, and for this, Unreal will not be my choice.

The last engine I tried was Godot, a very good engine open source that you can create 2D and 3D games, but I think the greater part is for 2D games. Godot has a scripting language called GDScript with a very simple syntax inspired mostly by Python, a programming language that I used a lot on my side projects.

In the end I chose Godot, mostly because GDScript is so similar to Python that I had the better experience of the three ones. Godot is also intuitive, and I think my challenge in the next days will learn everything about Godot and create the game.

I had a little extra time in this day, and started to learn about Godot using the Godot's fundamental's playlist in the Game Dev Artisan channel.

Day 03

This was a not good day. I mostly study how to use Godot, I learned to create collision and pickup items, but I tried to refactor my files and I delete my Player with all the animations and logic already finished 🥲🥲🥲. I stopped and I hope tomorrow will be a better day.

Well at late night I thought better and decided to start a new project, this time, with a better preparation, and clarification of the ideas. I started searching in the assets I downloaded at Ichio.io. I found a very good collection with free license Ninja Adventure, it has a full set of incredible pixel art with event dialog faces that I can use in the buy menu. The next step was think of what type of game I wanted and maybe, a tower defense it's really nice and I can reuse some code to other enemies. Other point is the map, I just need to create one for this first time.

To get started I search in the assets pack and decided the towers. Of course I can have a lot of towers, but the game is scope is to be small and fishable until December, so I cut and decided to create only 6 towers, each one being unique and having a upgraded version.

Name	Damage	Weapon
Knight	area, close
Mage	single, far
Support	None (gain coins and life)
Ice man	area, far (Slow the enemies)	Ice ball
Defense	None (Stops the enemies with barrier)	Stone Rock barrier
Summon	single, close

And when thinking of enemies, I would like to show the first boss early because, the objective is to create a simple game, so I decided to separate into 20 levels and each level will have a new enemy. Maybe I will change this in the future and just have 4 levels with a longer duration each one with a boss in the end. I don't know, and we will see what I end doing. For now, the level are these:

Level	Slot	Slot	Slot	Boss
1	x	x	x	x
2		x	x	x
3			x	x
4				x
5
6	x	x	x	x
7		x	x	x
8			x	x
9				x
10
11	x	x	x	x
12		x	x	x
13			x	x
14				x
15
16	x	x	x	x
17		x	x	x
18			x	x
19				x
20

The main idea is that each tower can be good/bad to a enemy type. For example the Knight tower is only able to damage near enemies but can deal area damage, so It's good to enemies that come in groups(Mostly land), on the other hand the Mage tower has single shot and far distance, which is good to fast and single enemies(Mostly air).

Day 04

This day I was little busy playing tennis with my brother and my girlfriend. Was the first time we played, it's nice, but tiring. Anyways, in the spare time I worked at creating the project on Godot (I know it still has the songs and tiles, but this I choose later). This time I looked a lot in the Godot Documentation therefore I don't have much to say, I mostly just studied.

Day 05

Today is Sunday, so I have all the time to play around with the game building. I started to follow a Youtube series from Game Development Center, it's a bit out of date, but we can get a very good idea to how tower defense games are.

The first classes is to structure the project and make the first configurations on Godot. He said that we can reuse this to future projects.

First, the folder structure. It is separated in 6 folders, the first one being the Assets, that is branched into Environment, Icons and UI, everything auto explaining. Inside the Environment we have Props(Files with one asset per file) and Tilesets(Files with two or more assets in). The Licenses is where you store license of fonts, assets and everything else. The Resources is objects that will be reused on project. The Scenes is where will be store all the objects(Classes) created. Lastly we have Singletons, objects that are independent from the rest of project.

Other thing I did is the first map, I finally learned about tilesets. Following the documentation and the video of Game Development Center I finally make the first map using some scalable techniques like make terrains.

Terrains for now is just used to create roads, that using assets Godot can automatically find the right asset to that road, this way I don't need to find the right asset to that corner on the road. I followed this tutorial by Maker Tech.

The map has still really poor flora and I want to trees like terrains, to be more efficient in creating forests (If you pay attention, there are some tiles with bugged trees). In general was a very productive game. If I hope I can keep up this rhythm.

Fist scenario with a lot of trees and a really strange path — Fist scenario

Day 06

This day I was busy with some stuff and could not make any progress 🥲🥲🥲

Day 07

I know I should give more attention to the map, but everything seems kind weird. The scale doesn't seems right. That's because I need to confirm that the scale is right to create the map based on. So I decided to create the first tower of the game, thinking mostly in adapt the scale (Spoiler I did not have the time to play with the scale).

Anyways, I started with node2D and then put the sprite inside, I don't know if this is the best practice, but for me, giving a wrapper of node2D makes me feel more organized. The sprite for now will be the idle:

Idle Knight animation spritesheet — Idle Knight animation

One thing is that it has right, left, bottom and top sides, which gives me the necessity to turn the sprite as the enemy changes it's direction. I started trying the sprite to follow my mouse, after many tries, I came with a simple code, but I happy that I can understand everything from this code. 😁

pythonextends Node2D
 
var direction = Vector2(0, 0)
 
func _physics_process(delta):
  turn()
 
func turn():
  var target_position = get_global_mouse_position()
  var character_position = global_position
  direction = (target_position - character_position).normalized()
 
  if(direction.x > abs(direction.y)):
    get_node("Knight").set_frame(3)
  elif direction.x < -abs(direction.y):
    get_node("Knight").set_frame(2)
  elif direction.y > abs(direction.x):
    get_node("Knight").set_frame(0)
  else:
    get_node("Knight").set_frame(1)

Gif showing character knight follows the mouse direction — Mouse following

Day 08, 09, 10 and 11

I am gonna group all these days together because I really did not have a lot of time to progress in the game and the little time I had was trying to make the map looks a little bit better. It was really hard, not because the sprites, they are awesome, it's because of me, I did not have and experience grouping those tiles together in a pleasant way to the eye. I don't know, I was looking for a diverse map, having the flower, ice, rocky and forest parts, but I don't know, something looks out of place.

Add more details(maybe too much) and removed most of trees — Map details

Day 12

This day I created another tower and rescale the knight already created to fit better in the map. It was very nice, I learned about scaling and import pixel art in Godot 4. I also put a base in tower to better highlight on map.

The code part was very easy, following the tutorial Game Development Center I just imported the logic from a generic class.

Picture showing the two towers created, one the knight and other the mage — Tower Knight and Mage

Day 13

It was a very short day. The only thing I could do was the main menu. I was following the video of Game Development Center, but in Godot 4, some methods have changed, main thing is to connect now is deprecated and we need to use something like [Node].[Signal].connect([method]) instead of .connect([signal], [object], [method]

Picture showing the menu created, three blue buttons — Menu

Day 14

This is one more busy day, I just make some initial HUD, following the same tutorial of Game Development Center. It was kinda simple because this hud doesn't do anything else, it's just two images.

I used the assets of Ninja's Adventure again, they are just wonderful, I just need to make them smaller, but this is problem for other day.

Showing the HUD below the map, having only the image of the two towers — HUD

Day 15, 16 and 17

These days I found a very big problem 😓. At day 15 I was intended to do the fifth part of the Game Development Center Godot's tutorial, but there were a lot of different things I did in the project that I was getting the consequences. Like the resolution of 1280x720 is too big for a 16x16 assets of Ninja's Adventure, so I tried to add scale and messed with everything else, now, 4 tiles were supposed to be just 1, and the collision system was not working and I knew I needed to make a work around that I would not like.

So after trying many strategies, I just stopped 😕.

User clicks in the HUD and get the tower to build it — Building tower

Day 18

I was so frustrated because of bugs that I decided not think about it today.

Day 19, 20 and 21

Even if I was frustrated, I have not given up, and would make the game from zero if necessary. And so I did, not everything, but I can guarantee was a lot.

One of the many problems was the scale, resolution and sprite sizes. The problem I had was a pixelart game with assets of 16x16 that was running on a resolution of 1280x720 which are 1280/16 * 720/16 = 3,600 tiles to fill the entire screen. Think about it, every sprite is 16x16, even the towers which in the 3600 tiles, max 10 would be towers, of course this will cause a strange sensation, it's not in the right scale. To solve this, I scale some arts, like the towers and bases, this way, a tower had 1 tile size, but the path was 3 tiles size. You can imagine the problem when making collisions.

To solve this, I changed the Viewport width and height to something way smaller (320x192) and put the Window Width and height Override to 3 times of the Viewport size. This way, the game will have a resolution of 320x192 and will open in a window of 960x576, making all the scale for me. The game now doesn't needed to scale some arts, everything from enemies, path and towers will be 16x16 and just one tile. I did a small change on the Ninja's Adventure' assets because some tiles were way to big for me, and then I made them smaller (Logs and a type of grass).

Picture showing the viewport 320 x 192 and the override 960 x 572 — Fixing viewport

The new map with only one clear path at center and forest borders, the HUD now is in the right, very clean layout — Map remade

Now using a resolution of 320x192 gives us 320/16 * 192/16 = 240 tiles only. It may look way to little, but is not. I feel I can make better maps with this size.

Of course this brought me a lot of more problems 🥲. All the assets in the scenes were with wrong sizes and so I went in every scene fixing the bugs (towers, map, ui, menu, everything 🥲. If you are starting as me, just make sure the scale is right 😅).

In this process I redid the menu, ui and the map. Here is the final result:

Remake of menu, now is dark with shadows on buttons — New menu

Note: I leaned how to animate some sprites in the map 🤩🤩🤩.

Day 22

Now after all that remake I finally can move on to other features. In this day I finish the selection and collision/building tower system. There were some changes to make from tutorial because Godot 4 has changed some names, but essentially is the same of the Game Development Center's tutorial.

Gif showing when tower is pickup you cannot put in other tower, or blocked grid — Collision

I also did a very simple thing that I was supposed to do in the first time starting this project 😅. A git repo.

Day 23

Now I can see a game under construction. This day I make a range indicator to tower following Game Development Center's tutorial #5. This range can be configured in a separate file, this way the towers can have different sizes of ranges (Of course this file also can be used to configured damage, rate of fire, cost, etc.).

A gif showing the range indicator, green circle area in the character — Range indicator

Day 24

It has finally come, the day I built the enemies. A enemy in a tower defense game should not be a problem, because it's IA is just- "Follow the path", and so I just need to configure the path and make the enemy follow it. Can easy be done using Godot's Path2D.

My problem was not configure this path, but configure enemy's animation, well the Game Development Center's tutorial #6 uses a top down view asset, as Ninja's Adventure' assets uses side view assets, so just rotating the sprite will not work in my case.

I did by calculating how the position is different from the last frame and give the right animation. Solving this made my day 😊😊😊. So Happy 😁.

GDScriptextends PathFollow2D
 
@onready var _animated_sprite = get_node("CharacterBody2D").get_node('AnimatedSprite2D')
 
var speed = 0.5
var last_position = Vector2(0, 0)
 
func _physics_process(delta):
  move(delta)
 
func move(delta):
  set_progress(get_progress() + speed + delta)
  var current_position = position
 
  if(last_position != current_position):
    if(abs(last_position.x) < abs(current_position.x)): # Going Right
      _animated_sprite.play('east')
    if(abs(last_position.x) > abs(current_position.x)): # Going Left
      _animated_sprite.play('west')
 
    if(abs(last_position.y) < abs(current_position.y)): # Going down
      _animated_sprite.play('south')
    if(abs(last_position.y) > abs(current_position.y)): # Going up
      _animated_sprite.play('north')
 
    last_position = current_position

First enemy following the path. It is an angry bamboo enemy — Enemy

Day 25

As I solve a lot of problems in the last days, I lost my track of progressing the game creation, so this day I finally had the sense of progression. I did a lot of things. First of all, I make a start/pause/fast forward system. Very simple, just followed Game Development Center's tutorial #7 and make some simple pixelart 16x16 sprites, because Ninja's Adventure didn't have sprites for arrow, double arrow and pause.

Second, the tower need to look at enemy and not my mouse 😅 I followed the most part of the Game Development Center's tutorial #8, but seeing the comments, we could improve the tower tracking.

In the video, Stefan select the enemy with most progress in the path (Which is very good, because more progress in the path, means more likely to complete the path), but this gets a problem when using more than one path. Think with me, if we have two paths and enemies in both that crossed the same amount of pixels, the tower will get confused with enemy is the right to pick. The best choice will be get the enemy with the largest progression and in the shortest path.

For example if we have two paths, one having 450px size and other having 200px size, there are enemies in both paths and the enemies have crossed the same amount of pixels, like 30. The progress of the first path will be 450 - 30 = 420, and the second will be 200 - 30 = 170, if we get the largest number, the enemy on path1 will be chosen, but can agree that is more likely to enemy on path two finish the path, because only need to cross more 170 instead of 420 in the first path. So that's why we need to get the minimum value.

After this though I made the damage system. It was very simple, the only thing I did different from the tutorial was that there, Stefan put a heath bar above the enemy. In my case, I changed the enemy color based on heath percentage like: heath > 70% = Normal Color; heath > 50% = Yellowish; heath > 20% = Orangish; else = Reddish.

The last thing I did was a shooting mechanic. In the tutorial, the towers shoot the same projectile, but in my game, it needs to be different so I abstracted the code and make a muzzle and impact animation for each tower, so thats in the future I can add a projectile to certain towers, like the Mage one, and for the Knight it does not need this. I will think more about this tomorrow.

The result:

Knight powers, lounging his spear — Powers

Day 26

This was a very simple day I just make the system of health and coin, there is no much to say. I just make some signals that are emit when enemy is killed or its complete the map's path.

Gif showing the HUD with coins and health and every enemy defeated, add one coin, if the enemy escapes, you loose one life — Coin - Health

Day 27, 28, 29 and 30

As the voting day is coming, I decided to focus in finish the main mechanics instead of adding new stuff, so I decided to make the last updated in this article grouping all the stuff made in the last 4 days.😶‍🌫️

Well, first of all, as usual I went through the game and noticed 4 things to do: The game need waves counter, more enemies, about page (Where the credits of me and Ninja's Adventure will be), and for last, there are some bugs to take care.

The first thing I did was about the waves. This time I would finally make the balance between towers and enemies (I can say to that I though would be easy, but not, this is a very crucial part that can make your game look good or terrible). Was very hard to do that, but I made. I add a simple wave counter, and made the waves into an GameData dictionary so I could easily modify. I add two more screens, one for Game over and other for Game Win. And of course, more enemies. They are just an extension of the main enemy's script, with some values and sprites changed (In the future, I want to make this less manual, to add even more enemies, creating a scene in usual way is no good). In the meantime I noticed that the game was very short, so I add a Infinity mode that would spawn random enemies (In the end, this was supposed to be a very challenging mode, but proved to be not so difficult, in the future I will change that).

The about page was very easy to make. It's just a simple new scene. The more complicated part was to create a Game over and Game win because these two scenes need to be over game's scene and not in root. But it was ok, and simple to do.😊

In the bug's part, there were a lot linked to the wave system. I don't know, but making all that logic in just one script just made it very confusing. This is one more thing to change in the future, a better game's script, I don't know, maybe just separate the logic of spawning enemies, controlling the waves, building towers and enemies path in a separate script would make so much better.

It had a bug in the fast forward too, but I could not had time to fix this, so it will be a future issue 😅.

You can play the game at Itch.io. Leave a message to me. I will be very happy to talk to you 😊.

Gif showing everything made, with new enemies- bugs — Final results

Game over screen, reddish, with two buttons to leave or play again — Game over screen

Final thoughts

Well, what I learned with all this?

This was my first experience making a game in a professional way (In some pro engine), so because of this there was many days that I was unmotivated, even if I came from web programming, coding in game, it's harder (Maybe that's because I did not knew the language) and that made me a little frustrated, but as I was going, never giving up, I saw a light in end of the tunnel. Some stuff that was hard to understand like what is a scene, became very easy and I could make all the changes that my imagination could have. I really like the experience.

Well, there was many thing I could not had time to develop. If you see the first days of this article, you will understand that, I planned a lot of things, the scope was too big for a first project that needed to be made in just a month, but that's ok, I plan to add these things later, I will finish the game as was proposed back there.

For last, thanks everyone who read this article. It was a very difficult month, but I could say that I very happy and proud about the results. I see you in the next article. Have a nice day. 😎✨✨✨😎. dt

References

Lee Reilly. Access at Nov 02, 2023

Game Off 2023 Page. Access at Nov 03, 2023

Game Dev Artisan. Access at Nov 02, 2023

About the author

Written by:

Felipe Scherer

- Software Engineer

Hello. I currently working as developer for more than 2 years coding sites, apps and games. In the free time I like to write articles to help people get started in this incredible world of coding. Feel free to explore my Github and use my public code 😊. Don't forget to follow me on my socials. 🌟

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Making games is hard, but making a game in a month is insane 🤯 I participated in Game Off 2024 and here you will find all my experiences, challenges and pain with a bonus of my first time experience using Unreal Engine 5. ## What is Game Off Game Off is a annual game jam hosted by Lee Reilly and Github. At the start of November you were given a theme and use this as base to make a game. The event allow using any kind of tech, game engines or libraries. What is important is finish the game and stick to the jam's theme. ## A game developer planning One objective I give myself this year, was to create a nice game like I did last year in this same jam. Last time I started from zero and learned about Godot, I liked but there were some limitations I faced, most likely godot developers more experienced would have knew how to handle the situation, but I as a new developer got frustrated those times, and lost a lot of time trying to understand the Godot insights. Because of that, and also a new feeling of creating something in 3D, I decided to use something else than Godot, most between Unreal and Unity. Deciding to go for Unreal, because Unity despite being very good, I would need to learn another programming language, what is not the case with Unreal, because I already now a little bit of C++ and most important, the blueprints seems a lot easier than a whole new programming language like C#. In my free time, I started to learn more about Unreal, making a simple game to learn the basics. And there we are, November is here with the new edition of Game Off 2024. ## My first thoughts In 2024, the theme was secret, could be anything related to this, even the acronyms SECRETS (For example Synchronized Events and Cryptic Riddles for Enigmatic Triggered Solutions), so the imagination go wild. But before the jam, I already had a crude base of what I want to do. I think everyone knows about Minecraft, this game was part of my life, and specially I liked to play with mods from the community, mods like IndustrialCraft, BuildCraft, ThermalExpansion, Botanica, and many others. But specially, my favorite mod by far was Thaumcraft, a magical-industrial mod that added new items, features, biomes and automation. Everything I wanted in a Minecraft mod, specially because the assets were very detailed and beautiful. But you see, in this mod there was a mechanic where you extract aspects from items, like a dirt would have aspect of Terra, or a clay would have aspect of Aqua and Terra. Those aspects could been stored in jar, where could be used to craft more advanced items. I wanted to get a similar idea for my game, probably with a Overcooked like system. The game would have a magical theme where you would extract essences from random items that would pass in a conveyor belt and then a client NPC would request a potion made by those essences. I love this idea and I will make something like this in the future, but the jam has the theme SECRETS, and how to adapt this idea for this theme? ## The creation of the core mechanic The first day of November I was trying develop some idea to fit the theme in my game, but I was not satisfied, and even using ChatGPT to get more ideas, looked like I was not getting somewhere. But suddenly I remember seeing my brother playing a game called Paper's Please. I already knew how the game worked, and I do not know why, but I got a really great idea. What if the client NPC instead of telling in your face which potion it need, use a kind of riddle in the request? Yes, there is the theme SECRETS in action, was perfect. The only problem I already was in the 3th day and at first I wanted to make the graphics like Overcooked, I have already been doing some 3D work in Blender, but you see, I was alone with the project, making a full game, with music, modeling, assets, material, code, level design and everything in my free time was very unlikely to happen, so I need to simplify the scale. ## From 3D to 2D At this point I already had knew a lot in Unreal, and was very confident about my skills, but the fear of not being able to finish the game in time made me want to change my plans, and I remember a very great game called Cookie Clicker, which have, in my opinion, a great interface for a game if that many content, why not make something similar? I do not wanted a clicker game, but I wanted the interface look of Cookie Clicker, for this reason I started to draw some raw blocking design but I wouldn't even imagine that this would have nothing to do with the final project. <Img src="/raw-draw-mystic-cauldron" name="Raw draw of the interface" alt="Raw draw of the interface" /> ## The feature eater At day 5, I already had realized that the scope of the game was too big for just me to handle in a month. For that reason, I started to remove some features like the conveyor belt and sticking more with the core mechanic- Player would have to guess what potion the client NPC wanted by it's hints. If you do not realized from the raw draw, I had a lot of unnecessary widgets that could be cut from the project. In the end I got a very minimalistic style that could be done easily in a month, and if left some time, I could improve by adding features like upgrades. ## The game Finally I had something. The core concept still remains- Players would guess what type of potion a NPC client want. I decided to go with 5 essences (Earth, Water, Fire, Disorder and Magic), and making a potion by adding two essences and one flavour(refreshing, sweet and spicy), the order would not matter, so Earth + Water, would get the same result as Water + Earth. This gives me a total of 10 different potions and more 5 because I wanted a double potion like Earth + Earth, total of 15 essences, so I would need to create at least 15 dialog, which seems too much, but is not, specially with the help of ChatGPT. The roadmap stay like that- NPC came and asks for a potion, you as a player, need to select the right essences and then craft a potion. It will take some seconds to craft, and then you can verify with the NPC if is the correct one, if not, you can store for the next NPC or delete. After a successful request, you earn some money to spend in upgrades and after delivering all the potions from that level, you go to the next, where new potions will be asked. <Img src="/monster-button-3d" name="" alt="A very big wall populated with buttons" /> ## Work in progress I started coding the project in the 8th day, which could be alarming, but I felt everything organized and ready to go. In the first days, I wanted to know, if with those features simplified, I could do a 3D game, so I sacrifice 2 days by making like a button monster and configuring the camera, but in the second day, I realized I was losing too much time in unnecessary things like the camera, so I went for my original plan of doing a 2D game. Unreal have a great system of interfaces called widgets or UMG, soon after, I already had learned will be way quicker than a 3D game, but I also realized that the assets would be made very soon or I would need to get from internet. In the mean time, I was doing the code with mocked images, like white squares and colored circles and I had made my first part of the game- Essence selector and I was ready for the next step, the crafting station, or so I thought 😰. <Img src="/first-essence-selector" name="Essence Selector" alt="Square full of button circles that represents the essences" /> ## My new nightmare- timers The crafting station would need to have the crafting part and the balcony part. I first made the crafting and was very easy to add the essences from the essence selector, but I never could image how hard would be to make the crafting part. If you do not remember, I had a plan of making the crafting some seconds long, so player would not spam potions, but for some reason I could not make the timer work properly and for worst I could not even debug that, because sometimes would work and sometimes not. I remember losing a LOT of time in this feature, I tried a lot of strategies, even recursion. But I always end in the same problem. Today I feel like I would suffered a lot less if I had read the full documentation. So if you are new to programming or want to get better, read the documentation, specially if is in a great organization and had lot of content, like the Unreal. But at this point I did not have time to read the full documentation and the page of timer was confusing to me. I decided to leave the bug and start to do something else, maybe in the future I could solve this. ## From hell to heaven- Data Tables While I could not solve the bug, I started to make some changes in the main structures- You see, before, I had a enumeration for the essences and then when crafting, they need to look of each recipe to see what is right. I know the game has a small scale, but I wanted to learn the right way now, start my studies in what is called Data Tables, some beautiful and shiny solutions for my problem. You can think in it as a collection of structures, or objects in other programming languages. With that in my, I know if I want to add more potions or essences in the future, would be very easy. I want to take a few lines to explain how I did the logic of ids. First, every essence has a id, 1-Water, 2-Fire, 3-Earth, 4-Magic, 5-Disorder, but the potions has an id of a string of the ids that made that potion, for example, Pure water potion has an id of 1_1, the Water-Fire is 1_2, always registering the potion with the smaller essence id first than the greater one. With this, when searching for the specific potion, the code will always knew the right id, for example if I give essence magic and earth, the output will be 3_4, so just look for this id and nothing more. When researching about this, I also came along a very good strategy for a game with many crafts, like Minecraft. And is using a table for the items, and a separated table for the recipes, this makes code for organized and will be easier later if need to add more recipes for the same item. I know my game will not have more recipes in the future, so this is not a problem. Before going to the next point, I also want to say that I dropped the idea of flavours, I thought the game was good enough without them. ## Thanks free assets The journey was tough, but would be even tougher without free assets. The majority was modified by me, but they gave me easy and a fast way of creating the perfect feeling I was looking for my game. Thank you for all people who did it. I would never did the game in a month without them. Assets list: - [Free 39 Portraits Pixel Art Game Assets](https://free-game-assets.itch.io/free-39-portraits-pixel-art-game-assets) - [[Valley Friends] Potions](https://pixerelia.itch.io/vf-potions) - [Cursor Pack](https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pack) - [Modern Interiors](https://limezu.itch.io/moderninteriors) - [Sunset Tavern in the woods](https://www.fab.com/listings/550baecc-f4cb-4071-91f5-0af0391481c6) - [RPG Essentials SFX Free](https://leohpaz.itch.io/rpg-essentials-sfx-free) ## Last bug corrections In the end of the month, there were a lot to fix and make the game "playable", so I focused on this, specially the timer problem. I take a lot of time to learn how properly use the timer's functions in Unreal. I think they are a bit of confusing, and as I did not have so much time to deep learning, bring me a lot of trouble. Other bug that gave me headaches was the cursor which came in the center of the screen for no reason and in a randomly way, this I could not solve it 😞. Well there was minimum corrections, but in the end I posted the game on December first. ## What I think This was a short but also intense month, which game me a lot of experience in developing games in Unreal, and also put in practice a more complex idea than previous projects. I really liked and in 2025 expect me participating more and more in game jams out there. Thank you so much for reading this article. If you wanna see and play the game for yourself [take a look](https://drafonf.itch.io/mystic-cauldron) and as always, see you in the next article 😉 Bye!

12 must have VSCode extensions

VSCode is one of the most popular IDE's for coding everything from Java to Javascript. VSCode is super customizable and for that the community created a lot of custom extensions for VSCode. That's what we will cover in this article. ## Extensions.json This is a file you can add to `.vscode` folder and configure a set of extensions that are recommended by VSCode if the user don't have them. ## 1. VSCode Eslint <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/be8bd7f5-b4f1-40c7-9974-290068604da3" name="VSCode Eslint" alt="Print showing VSCode Eslint extension" /> [As the doc says](https://eslint.org/docs/latest/use/getting-started): <Blockquote cite="https://eslint.org/docs/latest/use/getting-started"> Eslint is a tool for identifying and reporting on patterns found in ECMAScript/JavaScript code </Blockquote> This means that its goal is to be a tool to enforce certain patterns that we can consider "Good practices" or just avoid errors and bad syntaxes. This is possible by using a big set of rules that are completely customizable, and with just one line you can turn on or off the rules that you prefer and of course there are a lot of custom rules made by the community that in addition to add more validation to Javascript, also makes an integration to other stuff you may have like [React](https://www.npmjs.com/package/eslint-plugin-React), [TailwindCSS](https://www.npmjs.com/package/eslint-plugin-tailwindcss), [Typescript](https://typescript-eslint.io) and many more. So Eslint is very good but why do I need the extension? Well, you can run `npx eslint .` every time to check if Eslint got any error or warning, but if you want something more fast and easy to do, and trust me, you do, [installing the extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dbaeumer.vscode-eslint) allows Eslint to run parallel while coding, ensuring that the error will be shown as you code. **Link for download**: [VSCode Eslint](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dbaeumer.vscode-eslint) ## 2. Git Lens <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/5a918dda-768d-40ae-b1aa-7baf01632f11" name="Git Lens" alt="Print showing Git Lens extension" /> Have you ever code with a partner? A friend, co-worker or relative and found a line with a very serious bug and needed went to Github to found how made that line? Well, with Git Lens solves your problem by adding a little hint of who made the last update to that line and in how much time ago. I can tell you must be thinking. How this is so useful? For me, it can be handy to have, you may forgot the extension installed but at some time I can assure you will use. Not only for to know the person how did change the line, but also to know when was the last time that line was updated. I know Git Lens offers other uses, but for my necessities this is good enough. You can read more about it [here](https://www.gitkraken.com/gitlens). **Link for download**: [Git Lens](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=eamodio.gitlens) ## 3. Editor Config <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/433781d2-df06-44ee-a87c-0399dd640e7e" name="Editor Config" alt="Print showing Editor Config extension" /> [Editor config](https://editorconfig.org) is a set of configurations that can maintain consistent coding across multiple IDEs, the configurations are basically about indentations, file formats, charset, unix style new lines, etc. This extensions enables to overwrite vscode configurations with the ones set on `.editorconfig` file. I always like to config this file instead my vscode because this way I know the code will be more consistent across multiple IDEs. **Link for download**: [Editor Config](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=EditorConfig.EditorConfig) ## 4. Print showing Code Snapshot extension <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/9fe14a53-fdf7-4849-b417-7ad969150b72" name="Code Snapshot" alt="Print showing Code Snapshot extension" /> I confess that Code Snapshot is not a super must have extension, but it is really nice and works really well. It can take screenshots from your code in MacOS style for you to post anywhere you want, like in a social media. **Link for download**: [Code Snapshot](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=robertz.code-snapshot) ## 5. VSCode Icons <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/f310c814-9f83-4752-a1a6-d21c8e9be2e2" name="VSCode Icons" alt="Print showing VSCode Icons extension" /> This one has a lot of my opinion, but I really think you should have an extension to modify your icons. It help so much when finding that specific file, I always go for the icon first instead of the file extension or the name of it. **Link for download**: [VSCode Icons](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-icons-team.vscode-icons) ## 6. Import Cost <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/80b88259-d63e-4233-b75d-32881818b14b" name="Import Cost" alt="Print showing Import Cost extension" /> One of the most important thing we as developer need to understand is how our site can be found by search engines like Google or Bing, and one thing I see a lot is a very large [First Contentful Paint(FCP)](https://web.dev/fcp). This is basically the time when the first render of page ends and this is [crucial for user experience](https://web.dev/fcp/#what-is-a-good-fcp-score), a bad time may result in user leaving your page. One of the strategies to decrease FCP time is the only first load the necessary and after you can load the small pieces like an api call. And this can be achieved by removing all the big bundles inside your project. The [Import Cost extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wix.vscode-import-cost) helps you to do that by showing the bundle size of that lib and then you can or remove it or search for a lighter lib. **Link for download**: [Import Cost](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wix.vscode-import-cost) ## 7. Markdown All in One and MDX <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/53dd13aa-8bef-4898-9604-45bf2d875d79" name="MDX extension" alt="Print showing MDX extension" /> <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/61d48f6d-a3bb-419a-bc6b-f0952582bd7d" name="A markdown file" alt="Print showing markdown file" /> In this topic I will put two extensions because I know not everyone is a React developer and uses [MDX](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=unifiedjs.vscode-mdx) files as I use, so it is more reasonable for these people use [Markdown All in One](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yzhang.markdown-all-in-one) that gives all the essential stuff to have a great time writing your files. For React developers I suggest using [MDX](https://mdxjs.com), a superset of Markdown allowing to use React component inside Markdown. It is super handful and as I see, MDX is becoming a popular way to write Markdown in [NextJS](https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/configuring/mdx). You can even use [Content layer](https://contentlayer.dev/docs/sources/files/mdx-d747e46d) to type your Markdown, if that's not fantastic I don't know what is. **Link for download**: [Markdown All in One](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yzhang.markdown-all-in-one) **Link for download**: [MDX](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=unifiedjs.vscode-mdx) ## 8. Code Spell Checker <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/fd817aa8-e864-4a55-98a9-8844c359cd9e" name="Code Spell Checker" alt="Print showing Code Spell Checker extension" /> Again, if you write files Markdown or anything that will probably be useful to have a grammar corrector and this extension is just like that. **Link for download**: [Code Spell Checker](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker) ## 9. Auto Rename Tag <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/10594378-40dd-419a-8ff6-9c38c2ec95e0" name="Auto Rename Tag" alt="Print showing Auto Rename Tag extension" /> One of the most useful extension I use is Auto Rename Tag, this as the name says, when change the tag name, the matching one will be changed too. **Link for download**: [Auto Rename Tag](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=formulahendry.auto-rename-tag) ## 10. Themes <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/effc88d1-7a25-40a3-b2b4-2c5f02c1d93f" name="Dracula Theme" alt="Print showing Dracula Theme" /> In number 10 I will put a more vast collection of extensions used to change the VSCode appearance, of course I am talking about [themes](https://vscodethemes.com/). There are a lot and I mean A LOT of available themes that can change the most different aspects, but most likely the colors, you can find a more lighter, darker, greener, yellowish and many more themes. If you want a recommendation, I would certain suggest to use [Dracula Theme](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dracula-theme.theme-dracula), it is one of most famous themes out there with more than 5 million installs. The colors are great even for dark environments or bright environments. **Link for download**: [Dracula Theme](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dracula-theme.theme-dracula) ## 11. Extra ones Well, for last I would suggest you to install the extension useful for what you are using to code, like if you are using [TailwindCSS](https://tailwindcss.com), please use the [TailwindCSS extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bradlc.vscode-tailwindcss), and this can be applied to everything in your project, [Styled Components](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=styled-components.vscode-styled-components) or even other language than Javascript like [Python](https://www.python.org) VSCode has the extension [Python for VSCode](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-python.python). So have a look what you have installed and search if has an extension that could help you. 😊 ## Conclusion Conclusion reading this article you were introduced to a set of VSCode extensions that can help improve your coding time and quality. All of that are free and can be downloaded from [Microsoft VSCode MarketPlace](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com). Thank you for reading and see you in the next article. Have a nice day. 😎✨✨✨😎

Create custom classes Tailwind

Tailwind CSS is a popular modern CSS framework known for its utility-first approach. Unlike component-based frameworks like Bootstrap, Tailwind provides a collection of low-level utility classes that you combine to achieve your desired styles. This approach offers greater flexibility and granular control over your styles. It also boasts excellent build optimizations, including generating only the classes used in your project. While Tailwind offers built-in customization options, this article explores various methods for creating custom classes, with a focus on maintaining a positive developer experience. ## Tailwind CSS: Beyond the Basics - Crafting Custom Classes Tailwind CSS has a lot of classes, but there is some time you find yourself the need to use a class that are not in the default package, so what you do? There are a lot of ways to create custom classes, described in [docs](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/adding-custom-styles). I am gonna go though all of them, but be aware my favorite is the last one- By creating a plugin, so if you want, just skip to here ## Arbitrary values-properties-variants Tailwind is built for really hard customization, and that’s so true, you can literaly create any class just combining some prefix or sufix and the compiler will generate for you the classes for build. So, Why we avoid this approach when dealing to customization? The answer is because this goes agains the reusability concept of Tailwind, and if you use more than one that that arbitrary value, I recommend to create a custom utility for it. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/76b33e7a-bd3f-4940-aabd-e3232034fc7b" name="Arbitrary property Tailwind example" alt="code example of tailwind arbitrary using a color of background" /> <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/9994a2a8-a1df-4be8-813a-759d7ea15e64" name="Build file " alt="Build file showing the arbitrary property became other class" /> ## Customizing the theme If you want to change the properties already build in, like the font-size or color, it’s perfect and really easy to do just customizing the Tailwind theme file. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/3fcdaf65-9624-4966-8ccd-49aa74daf8c1" name="tailwind.config.ts" alt="Creating a class my-blue in Tailwind file" /> <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/61559e23-be18-43ea-a0a5-04dc0fbca834" name="Code example" alt="Using the custom classes created in a div" /> <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/810e5dfc-70f1-4505-88df-bc1a25c8653d" name="Build file- This may looks weird, but is the same blue I configured, but just with some Tailwind optimization." alt="Build file showing that Tailwind handle better using theme" /> The problem is when you need to create a custom component class, like you repeat that same classes and that became redundant and hard to read. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/5920d701-17f9-476e-8df4-c5c3024c4594" name="Example of reduntant classes" alt="File showing a lot of container with same classes" /> Isn’t better having just one class like `hello-world-container`? Yes. ## @layer and @apply directive There is a way to add custom classes using some Tailwind directives in CSS files. Like this: <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/53c6e419-42b5-472e-a321-1af95569e58b" name="Example of reduntant classes" alt="File showing a lot of container with same classes" /> You can literaly put any CSS valid property just like the way you would do in normal CSS, but noticed I put the classes inside some directives, why? Tailwind is composed by layers that can be overwritten, eg. You have a base style for your button but you want to change it’s color just in one component, to make that you will need to overwrite it, in normal CSS you will probably use !important, and trust me in my experience if you had use !important, probabily there is something wrong with your code. So use layers with wisdom. I recommend using: - [@layer base](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/adding-custom-styles#adding-base-styles) for tag styles, like I used in the example for tag `code`. - [@layer components](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/adding-custom-styles#adding-component-classes) for classes that has more than one style like the `hello-world-container` which has **display: flex;flex-direction:column;justify-content:center;background-color:purple;padding:1rem**. Most customization you will need is gonna be made here. - [@layer utilities](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/adding-custom-styles#adding-custom-utilities) is the highest priority, so use carefully. I recommend using just for one single property like **transparent:background-color:transparent**. This will mostly be used for classes that do not exist in default Tailwind. Well, so we learned about the @layer directive, but what is that @apply in the example? This is a way to use your Tailwind token in the styling file. For build does not matter if you use the **hello-world-container** or **hello-world-container-2**, both produces the same result, so @apply helps your code readbility. Using directives may seen the best way to create custom classes in Tailwind, but as I said in the beginning of the article, this is not my favorite way. I prefer much more creating a custom plugin. ## Why I do not like Tailwind directives like @layer and @apply Fist I need to say why I love the experience of working with Taiwlind insted other CSS framework similar like Bootstrap. Tailwind has been investing not just in optimizations and fast files, but in development experience too. Tailwind has a very nice VSCode plugin called [Tailwind Intellisense](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/editor-setup#intelli-sense-for-vs-code) I personally do not recommend you use Tailwind without this plugin. One thing it changes is when you hover a class, it shows what is that CSS equivalent, is literally required for me and I do not see me not using it. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/9b5e1959-3c80-4589-867c-47b0fdf40e48" name="Tailwind VSCode Intellisense showcase" alt="Print showing when hovering the class has a popup showing CSS equivalent" /> You know, when you create custom classes, you need Tailwind Intellisense to recognize it, but I never found a way to make recognize directives like @layer. When creating custom classes like that, you do not have the hover preview :( This is unacceptable, specially because custom classes do not exist in Tailwind Docs, is the most important classes to have a register and a easy way to check the CSS equivalent. So going though Github Issues and making a lot of testing. I probably have the best solution to create custom classes in Tailwind. ## Create custom plugins As you can see there are a lot of ways to customize you styles in Tailwind, but there is superior way to customize and still get the Tailwind Intellisense working for us, it’s called 🪽 Plugins 🪽. What is and how we implement? <Blockquote cite="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_(computing)"> is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program </Blockquote> So in [Tailwind](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/plugins) is not diffent, plugins are a way to modify the base of Tailwind, you can do a lot of it, but in this article I just gonna show how you can use to create custom classes styles. Every Tailwind project has a **tailwind.config.js** or **tailwind.config.ts** which has all of Tailwind’s configuration, including the **theme** from earlier, but what we want is the **plugins** <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/27b51eae-d5a0-4c14-81cf-19c97aa76398" name="tailwind.config.ts" alt="tailwind.config.ts file" /> You will need to use a function from Tailwind called `plugin`. I highly recommend using Typescript, for its typing features, which helps a lot, but of course you can use Vanila Javascript too. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/e42b46ba-2710-4575-81b4-6ad8e864e30f" name="Plugin function" alt="Plugin function" /> In it’s parameters you put what you want to create. For this article, we want a component, so we use the addComponent param. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/bee18037-70d5-435f-810f-fa6876a62629" name="Plugin function add components" alt="Plugin function add components" /> Now just add the class name and the styles like CSS or (CSS Style Declation)[https://www.w3.org/TR/cssom/#the-cssstyledeclaration-interface] (backgroundColor insted background-color). <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/5a6db547-3f58-4eca-98ce-c5564885fbd6" name="Custom class made by plugin example" alt="Custom class made by plugin example" /> And there you go, now you have the hovering effec from Tailwind Intellisense :) <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/fennec-tales-blog/assets/62115215/688da377-c59e-4cd2-ba24-b02499d4da25" name="Class in action" alt="Print showing when hovering the custom class made by plugin, showing the equivalent CSS" /> ## More dev experience Here's an additional tip to elevate your Tailwind development experience: consider using the [eslint-plugin-tailwindcss package](https://www.npmjs.com/package/eslint-plugin-tailwindcss). This ESLint plugin offers various features to help you write cleaner and more maintainable Tailwind code. ## Summary This article explored various methods for creating custom classes in Tailwind CSS, emphasizing the importance of a positive development experience. By leveraging Tailwind plugins, you can create custom styles while maintaining IntelliSense support and overall code clarity. This approach empowers you to extend Tailwind's capabilities while keeping your development workflow efficient and enjoyable. Thanks for reading see you in the next article, have a nice day 😊

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Game Off 2023 Journey

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12 must have VSCode extensions

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Create custom classes Tailwind

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12 must have VSCode extensions

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