Super Displacement

Super Displacement is a hectic game in which you bounce around and avoid touching the walls.

If you like the sound of that, feel free to continue reading.

As some of you who keep up-to-date on my work may know, I recently dropped another project to remake "Don't Be Still". After starting work on "Don't Be Still", I realized that the initial mechanic had no place in the rest of the game, and I renamed it "Super Displacement".

The premise of "Super Displacement" is very simple - don't touch the walls, and shoot the rectangles that are trying to bounce you into the walls.

Playing it myself(I may be biased) and receiving feedback from friends(also biased), it seems to feel pretty good. I feel confident in saying that this is my best work yet, though that doesn't mean much given my portfolio of abject failures.

Unfortunately, screenshots do not do the frenzied nature of the game any justice. If you like screenshaking, explosions and lots of bouncing around, then this game is probably going to be enjoyable for you.

I've spent a lot of time in this post just "selling" this (free and unreleased) game to you, so now I'm going to talk about something which no one online seems to tell you. Also, if you're not programmatically inclined or don't use the Godot engine, this might be of limited usefulness for you.

Handling Save Data in Godot

So, Super Displacement uses save data to store highscores and a couple of other statistics. Unfortunately for me, due to Godot's rather limited documentation no one told me that Godot fucks up when you try to save the file as a resource("res://...") rather than as a user file("user://...").

In short, files referenced as a resource("res://...") are contained within the executable while files referenced as a user file("user://...") are contained within something like $HOME/.godot/Super Displacement/

Apparently, resources can't be written to in the same way that user files can.

If there's a takeaway from this short segment, it'd be "Don't be afraid of using user files because resource files have annoyed me and taken an hour of my life from me and I hate them forever".

In any case, thanks for reading.

Godot Is The Best Engine - Godot vs Unity

This is a video I made to compare these two engines. The transcript is below, enjoy!

So, this is a new series I’m doing where I’ve decided I’m gonna be an unpaid shill for the Godot engine, and compare it to some other engines. This first episode is going to compare Godot to its obvious competitor, the Unity engine.

At a first glance, Godot and Unity are not so different from each other. Having said that, Unity puts a massive emphasis on its 3D editor, while Godot is primarily made for 2D development. That’s a pretty big difference right off the bat, I mean they are primarily designed for two completely different jobs. However, given that they both have support for 3D and 2D editing, they can be suitably compared.

While Godot’s 3D renderer isn’t the best thing in the world, Unity’s 2D renderer is literally just the 3D renderer locked into an orthographic viewport.

The fact that Godot at least uses a separate dedicated renderer for 2D is an advantage in itself, seeing as that minimizes the amount of performance overhead that may otherwise be detrimental to applications that rely on a high frame-rate- which just about all games do.

Another thing that Godot has over Unity is that Godot is totally free. While Unity is proprietary and closed source, Godot is maintained by around a hundred developers on Github under the MIT license. This means that Godot is free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Stallman would be proud.

Leading on from this, Unity forces users of the free version to have a “Made with Unity” splash screen at the beginning of their game. Godot has no such limitation. Though it is there by default, it can be either changed or totally disabled as the user wants.

I will give Unity some credit, in that it does not use its own constructed programming language for the programmatic side of things. This is a genuine advantage that Unity has over Godot. However, having said that, Godot’s GodotScript can be made to integrate with precompiled C++ modules very easily, for more performance-sensitive tasks.

A massive thing that Godot has above Unity is the fact that Godot is cross-platform, and available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is very important for myself, considering that I use Linux as my primary operating system and Unity crashes usually within about 5 minutes of work. Last time I checked, right clicking on a drop-down menu forced it to close as of about 6 months ago.

Also, Godot exports to BSD running X11. Just consider that for a moment- what other engine even acknowledges BSD exists? I don’t think anyone developing the Unity engine knows what BSD is, but that’s speculation more than a criticism of their product.

Regardless, Godot’s user interface is a lot more intuitive, at least in my opinion. It makes efficient use of space and colours, something which I do not feel Unity does as well. A petty complaint, but if there ever was a time to say it then hey, here it is.

Also, Godot’s mascot is better than Unity’s so fu

Now look, obviously I’m not saying that Unity is a bad engine. Objectively speaking, it’s powerful and has been used for a number of very high-profile cases. Having said that, Godot beats Unity at every level in so far as 2D is concerned. I haven’t used Godot’s 3D options so I can’t speak much to that, but I’m confident in saying that it’s a worthy contender.

Either way, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next episode in the series on… I dunno a different engine probably.

What is the deal with Bethesda?

Bethesda Game Studios, for those out of the loop, is the studio behind games such as Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Fallout 4.

These games are usually produced to a pretty high degree of quality, all 3 of which boast expansive and detailed open worlds, a lot of in-depth lore and a bunch of side-quests.

Pictured below is an actual list of all the side-quests contained just within Skyrim without any DLC, or a total of 57 side quests.

With this much content and such a large world, surely Skyrim is a brilliant game?

Well, in contrast to the large fanbase these games have accumulated, I am highly inclined to disagree. It is correct that there is a lot of content in Skyrim, but what's the point in that content if it's an unenjoyable process to get through it?

The first point that I would like to cover here is the combat in this game.

The combat in this game is best described as if the combat in Dark Souls and a sloth had some kind of child, which was then implemented on a buggy-as-shit engine. Each attack takes about 14 years to complete, and often deals almost no damage at any given point in the game to make up for the fact that the scaling is incredibly artificial.

"So just don't use the swords!" is the logical continuation of that opinion, but after swords I have two other options - magic and bows. Using exclusively bows is the most boring and awkward thing to do ever, so that's a no-go. The combination of still very unresponsive and slow combat combined with limited ammunition makes it probably the worst option. At least I don't get punished for missing a sword strike.

Magic is the best out of a bunch of bad options, because at least it looks cool. It doesn't have the long-term punishment for missing that bows do, and it is in my experience marginally faster and more satisfying than swords. That's not to say it's a good experience, but it's an experience that makes me less unhappy with my decisions thus far in life.

This issue is significantly reduced in Fallout 3 and 4, which contains guns and VATS. VATS basically takes almost all the real combat gameplay out of the equation if you're like me and nearly exclusively use it to murder the opposition. The non-VATS shooting is still a bit uncomfortable, but god, Bethesda games feel so much better with guns even at that.

The strangest and in my mind, the most objectionable design choice that Bethesda have made is to keep their engine as a consistently buggy mess for about 8 years, or since Fallout 3's release. They seem to believe that having a terrible engine is part of their notoriety, or their identity in some form. This may be true to an extent, where people frequently ridicule the 75 degree surfaces you can just walk up as if they're nothing, or where the ragdoll physics are occasionally very bouncy or twitchy, but ultimately it just isn't funny anymore.

After 3 consecutive games with the same engine problems, it gets to the point where it just seems unpolished. I appreciate the initial "heh", but by now it just feels bad to play.

Of course, this is all my personal opinion. I don't represent the views of Blogger.com, you, or anyone who is not myself. It should go without saying that if you love Skyrim, then you do you! If you have fun with that game, I'd love to hear your perspective on why you do so.

Lastly, if you have done, thanks for reading.