Floopsle Devlog 1
Aug 03, 2022

Floopsle Devlog 1

Have you ever wondered where the word 'blog' comes from? Well, me neither, until I wondered where the word 'devlog' comes from. What I found was kinna interesting, so like, here it is:

'Blog' is a truncation of 'weblog' or web log. A Usenet legend named Jorn Barger coined the term to describe his process of 'logging the web' as he surfed. Barger's been blogging for longer than I've been a conscious smoosh of fuzz and brains, and he's surprisingly still active on Twitter @bnroj. A different guy named Peter Merholz thought it'd be cute to break weblog into 'we blog' on his site (it was very cute) and shortly after, the billionaire co-founder of Twitter Evan Williams started using it all over the place, including in the name of his then new venture Blogger. (Here's the wiki I learned all this from)

Anyway, a devlog is a blog post that's dedicated to the development of something. It's also what this is!

I'm working on a game that I'm currently calling Floopsle. It's a remake of Sega's arcade game Flicky (you can play Flicky here), but with rabbits and maybe more of a story and maybe some other stuff. I started this game six months ago when I was just getting into game development and had no idea how anything worked. The code was some of the worst I've ever written. I think game dev is heavily reliant on design patterns and strategies, so trying to build a game without knowing any game patterns or strategies took way more brain cells than I had.

I decided to back off from the idea for a little while and instead chill and have fun by participating in game jams. Game jams turned out to be less chill than I thought, and more of a manic hyperfocus blackout ending in a catatonic recovery period. Still fun, just kinna torture too. Now that I've survived a handful of game jams, I've decided to pick up Floopsle again and give it another shot.

So far I've re-coded the basic player movement and salvaged the animations from my previous attempt. I spent a long time trying to get the trip timing right. It looks like a trip, right? Like the rabbit just fell on its face?

floopsle-trip.gif

I've spent a lot of time tweaking the player's acceleration, slide, jump, and fall timings. I'll probably spend a lot more time on them too because I still need to add coyote time and jump buffering.

I've also added a follow mechanic so that squares and (eventually) other rabbits can follow the player around like in Flicky. I made it extra fancy so that the spacing between the followers can be set independently from the spacing between the player and its followers. Why? Because I foresee potential issues with this type of spacing. Also, because I tend to plan ahead when it's not necessary.

floopsle-follow-slow.gif

I threw on some camera follow too because that's what Flicky has. I'm not sure if this is the direction I want to go, but I'm rolling with it for now.

That's it so far! 👾

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