Did a tiny tiny bit of work on the 3D engine yesterday after a long pause, which basically involved submitting defeat and starting an overhaul of my Blender plugin. I guess I'll be making levels via Blender. For now.
Plan is to make another game this year (or next) to progress the engine tech a bit more. Basic design is in the works.
2D engine now has a functioning animation system; script for pulling groups of sprites from an image and then another script for outlining the individual animations, their speed, what frames, whether to loop or flip and more. Good stuff!
Dan suggested an editor. The thought makes me cringe; I've been slightly fed up of working with various UI frameworks. But then it hit me while I was in the middle of something else today that my 2D engine has a pretty simplistic but functional UI system that I've been looking for an excuse to flesh out a bit more, and that would mean the editor could be integrated within the engine. That means less work... Hopefully!
Didn't make much progress towards that today however. Considering how to do it. Probably just a pre-processor flag that denotes whether to compile as the editor? Handling this all at runtime always ends up a bit of a mess, at least with how I've handled it before. Do you do it via a keyboard shortcut? Should I integrate a console to allow the user to trigger a command (and flesh that out going forward)? Or should it just be a stand-alone application?
Thinking more and more about silly complex things, and really need to avoid that, just need to prioritise actually making progress!
Oh, and came up with a possible name for the game the other day. Dulce Somnii. It roughly translates to 'sweet dreams' in Latin. I've had it as my status on Discord for a while, but it might make sense for the game in mind, certainly more interesting than the other name that was floating around my brain.