manic modularity

financial stability continues to elude us (we have been full no-contact ghosted by three roommates in a row now),
however,
we are schmoving
i don't think development is going fast,
and i don't have any particular milestones to show off
but what i can say is that i currently feel the best i have about it since the end of reborn's development

so firstly, i have this issue where whenever i'm working on one thing i feel like i Should be working on everything or anything else. grass is always more productive on the other side-- or that's the grass other people want-- or something stupid like that.

anyway for a while I really wasn't feeling Meduca lately and I wasn't sure why.
but a handful of weeks-- or maybe a month and some, idk-- ago i woke up with a feeling like
i just want to get really good at godot
so i opened up some bullshit project and started fucking around with tutorials and other stuff and frankly had a great time doing it
so i've made the core of an aRPG
and in the process of doing that i accidentally recreated a tRPG grid movement
and i've learned a bunch of other neat stuff too

i wrote like three paragraphs kind of gushing about godot, but i'll spare you: i really like the program and can see myself using it for a long time.
but part of that is, perhaps just for my own emotional footing, building up some of the basic functionality that i left behind with RPG Maker.
things like, being able to pop a character in immediately and get them animating and moving. or displaying dialog-- let alone handling the flow thereof.
or basic map functionality.
none of this is particularly difficult in godot because it's a Good program, but it does need doing because it's not set up out of the box.
so i've been doing it.
a lot of it won't be useful for, say, Meduca in specific. but it's been fun to get going (pure text and writing is a vibe, but it's not always the most dopamine even to make, i guess!).
and now that i have all those things, i have them forever.
that was the gushing i omitted-- thanks to Godot's compositional approach, i can basically take any of those systems from one project, and Pop it into another.

i think that's part of why i like the program so much. i have this grass-is-greener on the other side, but one thing i've been accepting lately is that while i'm flitting between projects, i am still making progress on the other ones.
maybe that was always true because i wouldn't be able to do what i'm doing now without having gotten really good at mid-level programming reinventing wheels in RMMV*. even if i do not continue developing starlight in RMMV, the skill and time that i developed for myself is not wasted.
....buuuuuut with this i can just use things directly too! feels great.

*it's complicated. for everything RMMV does out of the box that godot doesn't, godot does so much more out of the box that RMMV doesn't. for instance, preloading. i spent so much time agonizing over preloading in RMMV. in godot? you just... type preload(whatever). that's it. done. it hurts me a little bit. but anyway, godot is set up to help you do the things RMMV does; RMMV is anything but set up to help you do the things godot does.

if godot is like assembling furniture from an ikea instruction set, building furniture in RMMV is like going out and chopping down the lumber yourself and cutting and sanding it and drilling the holes and--
look, i've learned a LOT about lumber and why furniture is made the way it is, but i still only made one chair and half a dining room table.

i would almost regret it but it's not like godot was more than legally a thing when i committed to developing starlight in RM, and i was just so excited that it WAS possible.

anyway.
i may or may not be flitting between five or so different projects right now, emotionally if nothing else
but i am having a GREAT time doing it,
and working on one project feels like working on them all

oh, right, meduca. so i've been doing all this and then like last week or so i go back to meduca, like coming home at the end of a long journey, and i open the project having gained more than a few levels in godoting
and
i am just as overwhelmed and discouraged by the prospect doing Anything editor-side as i was before.
what ?????
okay so i was using a third party dialogue manager before, inky, (sorcery, 80 days) and it's not like it hasn't been okay, but i think the answer is that
working in a third party system is just
not it for me
especially not when i have already been through the woods and sanded the lumber down myself
and now with the power i have
so i've been yeeting all of the plugin stuff out of the project and replacing it and it feels so liberating already ngl

ah this is all to say though that lately i've been writing an event-style interpreter for godot to recreate both the functionality of RM and inky
and i can just
write scenes on my phone when i cant sleep at night
and then just pop that into any project
it'll be fantastic. i'm hype. it's been a huge pain in the ass. i only have to do it once though so its k

c: hi. im alive. spent winter dying of depression, but i've at least hit a high-functioning point in it. little things?

so ame likes godot, but she likes second-guessing herself more, so i don't think she's giving the situation enough credit. godot is great. rpg maker & friends are not exactly the greatest programs, and i feel like in a dramatically short amount of time she's rebuilt a lot of her old rmmv pieces. godot is so good that it might just resurrect starlight.

i have not done much in it yet. i'm going to miss ruby when i do so.

right now i'm just ame's support system with a little bit of writing on the side. there's a lot of projects in the air, and frankly i think godot would enable ame to do a lot more random small projects here and there. i don't think that's a bad thing, since godot allows for more modular systems that can (probably!) be reused across projects. it's a -far- better fit for her. god she's been saying for ages that she missed when game devving was fun and by god she might just be back there again.

now idk what that means for y'all. expectations are ame's mindkiller and so i think it's in everyone's interest that they be kept away from her. that said, don't be surprised if this dumbass has a dream and then whips up a small game for it that week. so that could be fun.