Now - 8/31

Coyote vs ACME

Went out to see Coyote vs ACME with my wife. Had a great time, it was genuinely great to go to the theater again to watch something fun. I think that movie was more of a "Bring Your Kids" than a "Movie For Kids" because absolutely none of the children in the theater knew who those characters were.

At one point I heard a kid ask their dad who the little boy making tacos was on screen and I quietly whispered "That's Yosemite Sam" with a tear in my eyes. Is there even a place that shows Looney Tunes cartoons anymore? I'm pretty sure all my exposure is a side effect of them just being on some random channel all the time -- where do 2026 kids go to randomly discover an old cartoon?

Anyway that probably had some factor in their original decision to mothball it but that's still a crazy decision and we should point and laugh at WB for making such a crazy decision.

Shout outs to whoever decided to represent the Roadrunner this uncontrollable force of nature, lotta fun visual effects around that.

Books

I finished The Tapestry of Fate by Shannon Chakraborty. Loved the first Amina Al-Sarafi book to death, and while this one was still a good adventure, it definitely felt more subdued in scope compared to the first. Keeping the characters trapped on a magical island they can't leave and reducing the cast down to a core of three sort of grounded the whole thing and the mystery really takes it's time getting started before there's any sort of pay off. It has all the markings of Entry Two In What Will Be A Trilogy, so I hope whatever comes next sticks the landing.

I then picked up a copy of Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. So far so good, I've been on a kick of fantasy novels that take place during some kinda historical era apparently -- Before Tapestry I was reading The Devils by Joe Ambercrombie. Dark Fantasy set during the Plagues sounds...well not fun but a good way to spend my time at least.

Star Wars: Zero Company

Meanwhile, after a couple hurdles, my wife started Star Wars: Zero Company and I sat in. X-COM holds a very special spot in our hearts -- we were inspired to do a full playthrough of both the most recent games when Giant Bomb East was doing The Exquisite Corp and there was a period of time where she would do a campaign as her comfort game. I think she might have something like 12 War of the Chosen clears under her belt in the past four years? X-COM (and Critical Role) were both instrumental in getting her to try out D&D, and the idea of a new tactical roleplaying game was right up her alley.

So, about five or six missions in, when she turned to me with a look on her face, I was worried it wasn't hitting.

"No no, it's good, it's very good," she said. "But um...do you know what's going on?"

Reader, I didn't have the first clue. Neither of us knew a single thing about The Clone War.

See, we're the rare people who actually liked the prequel trilogy because we wanted to bite on to the politics. All the shots of the senate were our favorite parts. Like sure whatever, Obi-Wan is doing something, yeah yeah, tell us more about how the cost of grain is going up on. But when The Clone Wars came out, it was kind of like...a blur? There's a lot of shots of people in transports and the Clones are good?? And there's a war?? With...someone??

👩🏻:"Like who are we shooting? Who's got these weird lil sassy robot guys?"

🧔🏾‍♂️:"Palpatine. But he's not Palpatine yet."

👩🏻:"Right, so like...who's he hiding behind? We're the republic--"

🧔🏾‍♂️:"Who is good?"

👩🏻:"--For now but then they go bad--"

🧔🏾‍♂️:"Because the clones do the thing."

👩🏻:"Yeah. But who are we shooting before that?"

🧔🏾‍♂️:"hm..."

👩🏻:"hm..."

Then some bugs showed up and we figured that was probably more important than whatever is happening with the Clone Wars. Change the UI to the classic X-COM bar immediately though, the radial menu kinda blows.

Also this kinda sums up the whole journey:

Crawler Progress

Somewhere between Coyote and Star Wars I sat down and started working on my dungeon crawler. The goal was to get to the barest minimum prototype using Godot, and by god did I get to the barest minimum.

First of all, shout outs to two very specific tutorials:

Learning that you could use Godot's TileMaps TileMapLayer system to draw your own maps from a top down perspective and then have a script build 3D environments definitely helped get this off the ground quickly. I wound up using the locomotion system in the later video to make something quickly, but I want to go back and rejigger the whole thing using Raycasts to make more snappy movement, especially if/when I inevitably throw out the entire current map generation to put down hand designed dungeon tiles.

Next up is a basic UI and inventory system. Those will probably get their own dedicated post before I take a strong drink and even think about figuring out a real battle system.