I’m still plugging away at some basic game features. It’s honestly a little overwhelming to try and decide where to even begin, but I’m just sort of taking things as they come because, at this point, any progress is good progress. I’ve been tinkering with the visuals of the game, although without a ton of success. I will eventually need to put some actual thought and effort into the art direction of the game, but for now I’m just sticking stuff on the screen and letting it ride. I also tweaked some of the battle visuals just so you can see the enemies and the hero a little better. I created a little 3D grass object and a THREE.InstancedMesh to spawn 20,000 of them into the battle scene and the framerate took essentially no hit, so I’d call that a win. I initially tried creating an animation in the .glb file but quickly became concerned about performance since I would need a mixer for every single object. Fortunately, my friend Gemini suggested I create a shader to animate all the little grassies and that worked really well, again with essentially no effect on framerate. I think I might improve the inventory and character screens and release a new version this weekend, so stay tuned.
Month: March 2026
v0.00.001 (again, again, again)
Release AnnouncementI’ve released yet another v0.00.001 as of today. It’s really just a starting point but you can walk around a scene with basic collisions, travel to another scene, and fight some goblins in a very, very rudimentary battle system. I’ll keep adding features and polish as I have time, but give it a whirl for about 2 minutes until you get bored, then drop me a comment to let me know what you think so far, and what I should focus on implementing next.
I know, I know…
UncategorizedI have, once again, kind of started over on this project. The thing that’s changed since April of last year when I last updated on this is AI. I have been using Google’s Gemini product to help with basically all of the game dev tasks and it’s pretty amazing. From helping to flesh out designs, to ideas about the code structure, to actually coding big parts of the game, Gemini has been able to basically do it all. That’s not to say I haven’t done a lot. Gemini isn’t perfect and a human coder is still definitely needed to put all the pieces together and refactor all the fluff that AI systems are notorious for including, but it’s helped me make tremendous progress in a short period of time. Therefore…
I’m going back to THREE.js. I know, yet another spin of the broken record but I’m optimistic this time because I have some really good tools at my disposal to help keep me moving when I get discouraged or stuck.
Another thing I’m going to be more upfront about is funding. I’m doing this completely as a side project but I would like to be able to finish a fully playable game that is engaging and fun. I want to host the thing on my own server and, ideally, have it be completely free. Unfortunately, it’s probably a little unrealistic to think I can develop and host the game completely free. Even if I consider my time free, there will still be real world costs I can’t avoid. So, I’ve come up with a slightly unconventional method I would like to try if anyone is interested in contributing: Telcoin. If you aren’t familiar with Telcoin it’s a cryptocurrency that is intended to run in/on/with telecom networks. The project has been in the works for several years and is gaining momentum, but is still pretty niche right now. I’ve purchased a little Telcoin over the years so there are two ways you can support this project if you would like. First, you can send me Telcoin tokens directly. I haven’t published an address that can receive them yet, but I will eventually so if that’s something you want to do just keep an eye out here. Second, just buy some Telcoin for yourself. If enough people purchased some Telcoin tokens, even small amounts, it would drive the price of the tokens up and I would benefit indirectly. Depending on how far the project gets and whether I eventually have to bring in other resources or people I might consider Patreon, Kickstarter, etc. But I would much rather just raise what funding I can directly and cryptocurrency is a fantastic way to do that.
I’ll back soon with a new v0.00.001, so stay tuned.