#2019-10-01: September

The seasons are changing in Colorado and cooler weather approaches. Today has been a reflective day for me and I wish to record some project thoughts, mostly on the work of the past month. A visual overview can be seen in the linked video:

#Collision Subsystem

The collision subsystem is beginning to take shape. All entities can collide now. Different classes of collision such as obstacle or impedance are possible and processing is hierarchical with each entity choosing the strategy wanted (e.g., image bounds or collision rectangle array).

There is currently a bug where the collision class is not considered when sliding during multiple collisions. I would guess that there's also a bug in how active and inactive entities collide.

#Palette

Of the few content changes I made in September was a slight revision to the palette. I tweaked most of the colors and added a new shade specifically for drawing shadows on a variety of terrains. Such a little change took long!

Lately, I've been extremely guarded about adding new colors as in previous iterations I lost control of the palette. I'm still unhappy with the results but I think it's a slight improvement and am trying to wait to make further changes until more of the entities are available and I can balance them all together for a tremendously colorful scene instead of an optimal single character.

I worry a lot about color calibration and its been a recurring problem for the project. I notice subtle differences across my devices that make me sad and I have to force sRGB in Chromium.

Unfortunately, I don't have any cool before and after screenshots for the latest changes (and am too lazy to dig through Git) but I did aggregate a short clip of development from March 11th, 2018 through October 1st, 2019:

#JSON Schema

I spent a day experimenting with applying JSON Schemas to the entity subsystem, primarily through the excellent Ajv library.

The schema validation was valuable and it was nice to drop some of the custom (albeit simple) parsers for something extensible, "proper," and closer to TypeScript's virtues. However, I found support for deep merging, patching, and defaults lacking, I struggled with understanding JSON Schema's relationship with JSON-LD and related technologies, and it all just felt a tiny bit still cooking in parts. The TypeScript back and forth interface generation looked promising though I didn't get around to experimenting with it. I would also still need to either inject some custom parser logic for certain components or introduce a new lifecycle.

If the Nature Elsewhere system of entities was going to be far larger, I would most probably need a JSON Schema-like solution. In general, knowing when a solution is over- or under-engineered has been a problematic theme for Nature Elsewhere. For now, I think JSON Schema would be overkill.

#mem-font

After staring at pixelated print for ages, tweaking letters back and forth and then back again, and consultations with my partner, I've made several miscellaneous minor font changes to mem-font.

Most notably, I've embraced that the font is really 3px x 5px (not 3px x 4px) with 1px of leading. Given my pursuit of minimalism, it felt like a major concession. That's 3px x 3px for most of the letter forms and then another pixel above and below for ascenders and descenders. I've made the sizing change to the character images themselves which simplified the text layout code a little too at the cost of a slightly larger sprite sheet footprint.

I've also now tried to generally favor smoother forms and avoid diagonal pixels for improved readability.

All in all, I think the font is nearly readable now but I might increase the width in the future.

The updated sprite sheet for just the font is about 128px x 64px including a 1 px padding at a power of two sizing (appears out of order to packing):

I noticed today that the mem-font GitHub project, which is the predecessor to the letter forms used in the game and to which I haven't made changes to in over two years, now has FIVE fancy boi stars so I hope to push these Nature Elsewhere font changes back to the upstream repo one fine day and maybe give that whole project a rework.

#aseprite-atlas

I've moved the Aseprite parsing, animation, and collision boxing code to a new reusable TypeScript library, aseprite-atlas. In summary, the library parses and coalesces all animation data together into a simple data structure and provides some utilities for animating. I think it's in fair shape. I'm still working on a standalone demo but the functional code seems broadly useful and hasn't changed much in months so I hope the library will find use elsewhere.

#The Natural Engine, Entity Subsystem, and In-game Level Editor

So I can feel better about the all the "spare time" I've put into it, I'm going to start calling the game engine I seem to be building by a handsome name, maybe "the natural engine." Don't let the name fool you though, it's hellishly unnatural and the kind of engine that dies and refuses to start just around the time you lose cellphone coverage on the way to a job interview. Well, maybe a name I'll use just for this post.

Regardless of the name, I learned bunches about and made many improvements to that engine. This work was primarily driven by the necessities uncovered in development of the in-game level editor which now appears as:

The level editor's status is:

• Very clunky. No drag and drop yet and no way to pick between stacked objects.
• All the buttons are finally functional: decrease, increase, destroy, create, and toggle grid.
• Technically works on mobile if your meat wigglers are slim enough.
• No save option yet.
• Lots to improve upon.

Those level editor icons took ages, by the way, particularly the create icon which is intended to read as a flower. I probably should have settled on the sizing before digging in. Oh well.

It does and it doesn't feel like a lot of progress has been made. There's lots of infrastructure changes that I think were necessary. Most significantly, the level editor highlighted a number of design limitations in the natural engine's entity subsystem. For example, in previous iterations, it was possible to group entities and position them relative to each other:

This prior functionality was pretty important for very basic UI, such as the toolbar and even the simple title screen, but was left behind when migrating to an entity subsystem that better separated configuration data from code. Similarly, the prior system had better support for composing entities (via code not configuration) while the replacement system only had good support image compositions. For me, the parallels in requirements for even toy UI and modern UI libraries were striking.

The solution I pursued was to implement an entity subsystem with recursive support. That is, each entity can have children that are also entities and when an entity is moved, all of its children move too. This functionality is available from the configurations that are parsed through transformations, updates, state changes, the collision subsystem, and more.

The entity subsystem quite unsurprisingly is at the heart of the natural engine, but it wasn't something I gave serious enough consideration to previously. I guess because it felt more implementation agnostic than other features like graphics, audio, or physics and I figured in my little brain that if I could program data structures, it would just come together naturally without too much thinking. I was so wrong. This is the architecture.

Keeping entity configuration data and code separate has been working very well.

The entity subsystem will need lots more work but it's been quite interesting now that I recognize its importance and understand some of the problems it needs to solve.

I tried really hard not to build one but all this work in the natural engine--custom UI, isometric WebGL rendering, collisioning, an in-game level editor, and more, it's been kind of wild. Very challenging but fun and slowly rewarding. I feel like I'm in college giving it my all.

#TypeScript

Wow, TypeScript really is amazing. I can't imagine doing the refactors I've done this past month without it. I'm now a believer.

I do think there's a big learning curve though for scratch projects that don't lean on an existing framework of thought for how to pattern the code. I've wasted so many days trying different approaches and I'm still unsatisfied. Part of the issue is that there are some inherent limitations in the language that are not obvious and are big time sinks where one tries to figure out if they're misusing the language or not. Combined with the other complexities of a game and it's proven quite difficult.

I'm still struggling with system design in a big way. However, given the number of rewrites I've done so far, I've increasingly valued rather plain and blunt implementations, that are extensible, written as simply as possible, and easy to read and reason about. I've never been very good at holding a project in my head overnight so I've increasingly been writing for the idiot that comes in in the morning. Easier said than done but making new features obvious is the hope for the new entity subsystem especially.

#Import Loops

Import cycles keep coming up in my recursive parsers. I keep hacking around them as they have surfaced during other major refactors but I hope to look into this more seriously and fix properly.

#References

I am looking for relevant TypeScript project references. I think the compiler isn't so applicable.

#Shipping Library Types

The mechanism for this feels a little awkward. Producing the actual outputs, either via tsc directly or Webpack, is where TypeScript feels a little unfun to me.

#Prettier

I've said it before but it continues to amaze me how the Prettier formatter has changed the way I write and improved my quality of life. Code becomes less surprising and far easier to read at no cost after Prettier sweeps through. I can't believe how impactful and magical it is.

#oddoid

I've decided to revise the name from rndmem to oddoid. I don't think I'm quite happy with either but domain bandits captured my first choice days before I realized it. What a terrific waste of time.

#Levels

Levels have much better form now. In general, configurations and parsing is far more rational than its ever been before. The prior level state machine logic for transitioning between levels is mostly there with the notable exception that you can't go back.

The new title screen is up and it doesn't make me entirely unhappy. I like that it's simple but also miss the old look a little. I'm not sure what will live in options / settings so I'm avoiding that for now and mostly focused on the level editor.

#Input Subsystem

I've torn out the whole input subsystem including all the virtual joystick work. It saddens me but the API was cumbersome and I don't really know what I was aiming for. I just made a dumb pointer replacement and will readdress as needed. A willingness to start over is an incredible asset.

#Device Support

A big recent change in project vision has been to focus on pointers as a common denominator that will work on mobile and desktop. This has big design and technical implications. However, somehow, iOS only supports WebGL v1 so I may need to downgrade if that's not fixed before the game is out.

#Graphics

I've restored masking support. This enables the color of one image to appear the alpha mask of another. It's only used for font coloring presently and could be removed if needed.

#Updates

Updates now percolate through the system with a big honking god object called an UpdateState that contains the greatest hits for state changes and a little more including tick delta, camera, player and active entities. I wouldn't want to have to test any code that consumes one directly but its sure been nice not to have to constantly rethread changing dependencies in and out of the system.

#Rounding Errors, Floats, Integers, and Encapsulation

Fractional numbers are unfriendly to pixel art. A recurring problem in the project has been weird pixel glitches and these have often been rooted in rounding errors.

One of the worst issues came up this past month in that I wanted to allow subpixel velocity aggregation and didn't realize that introducing a single source of non-integer values would spread through the system like an infection and eventually cause what appear to be quite sporadic errors that usually manifested visually.

Although I had been careful, I also had a feeling that there were countless fractional numbers creeping in and I wasn't sure what to do about it. In C, I would have just used integer types from the beginning and it never would have been a problem but JavaScript only has number, typed arrays, and BigInt which each have their own tradeoffs. I chose number and just tried to use integer values and manual truncation. I felt as if I had built a house with bad bricks.

Most of the numbers in the game are stored in XY and WH types which were defined as {x: number, y: number} and {w: number, h: number}. In other words, just data without any encapsulation. I decided to experiment with replacing these data interfaces with classes that use getters and setters with the latter having an integer value check like if (!Number.isInteger(x)) throw new Error(). It g/setter syntax required only changes to the constructor and it worked kind of way better than expected. I was equally stunned by the effect on the code and my mental state. The power of this approach has given me lots to think about.

#Pixel Perfect

In general, keeping a responsive and as close to pixel perfect as possible render has been very important to my vision for the project. That is, make full use of the screen space available but honor the pixel. Just know what approach to pursue has been challenging but it was largely due to this strong interest that drove me to build my own engine.

Many modern retro games take a different approach which is often to render large blocky pixel art sprites in a very high resolution scene and I think the feeling is very different. For me, I think pixel art is quite unique in that pixels are digital, on or off and nowhere in between, and there's no blurriness unlike the real world. I think this perfect clarity is profound and so have endeavored to keep true to this wonderful property as much as possible for all visual matters.

The latest consequence is that the camera really snaps from pixel to pixel and it feels quite toothy. I think I'm comfortable with that. However, one thing I found was that keeping diagonal camera movements in sync across x and y axes was important to avoid a very jarring experience so there is special code for it.

I remain uncertain whether scaling should vary from level to level. I think it will work.

Those are my feelings so far anyway. I hope it plays well and compromises can be avoided.

#Content

Unfortunately, there has been very little time for art and content changes in September. I am optimistic the level editor will enable efficient and effective level designs and that the entity subsystem changes will make many entity implementations mostly obvious even when distractions are greater.

I've been checking Pixel Joint to keep my inspiration up most days and spent the summer trying to internalize scenes of nature I came upon.

#Isometric

I've been extremely pleased with the unexpected isometric direction the game has taken but continue to find it challenging to draw. I think it really helps solve the atmosphere problems I anticipated and works really well.

#Work

I always have lots of doubts about the project. Is it worthwhile? Is the code too lousy even for a hobby or lover of? Will the project be stolen? Will it be fun? Less so now than last year at least. As a personal project, my failures are my own and there is no recompense for self-deception.

My grandfather always told me that the secret to life is work. Even for fun, I think that's so true for many reasons. There is such a big difference between talking about all the neat things one would like to build and actually doing it. The former is nearly effortless. The latter can really take some doing and hard work. Even then, it may not work. I've found it difficult to work in earnest but that's all part of it.

Further, by nature, I am a lazy and intuitive thinker but I am slowly changing. In technical school, a classmate told me they could visualize a picture so perfectly but couldn't put it paper once it came time to draw it. I felt the same way until I was tasked to draw a human nose and finally realized, despite this feeling of perfect visage, I had no idea what a nose really looked like. So I worked at it. I can't draw noses or much else any more but for a time it was my specialty if so ever I had one. I think this level of clarity can only be found in work and there's no substitute for it. Everything else in life is theoretical. Success is work's achievement and a great fruit.

For this project, I've also found it challenging to wear so many hats and to balance planning and doing or even that so very important thing to have a real vision. Even effective notekeeping has been a challenge. It's hard to know the difference between doodling and planning some times. Working smart is hard work.

I hope to get to a point in the project where a single level is reasonably polished and feature complete. I'm far from that point but, to me, this would mean that few unknown unknowns remain and, with hard work, completion is an inevitably not only a possibility. I think that will be a really exciting feeling. For now, work remains daunting and the risk of starting over or failure feels high.

#Closing

The end is nowhere in sight but I'm enjoying the progress I've made recently. That said, I'm looking forward to taking some time off for November holidays, setting up a media center with the latest Ubuntu, and playing some games. I am grateful for the now, being able to get into deep thought and flow of work has been invaluable to my productivity and sense of well-being, but I likely have quite challenging professional work coming in November and I expect development to nearly halt because of it. I shall try to work earnestly.