agamerguy

Recently I obtained a Raspberry Pi 5. As usual, I like getting these devices to play around with game dev on low end hardware, and to see what others have made for them too. When setting up the usual suspects through apt; In this case Godot, GIMP, and Blender; I ran into a lot of trouble with Blender. Dependency issues on the latest RPi OS for 2.79b, and the latest build that works with the OS runs like garbage due to minimum OpenGL requirements can only be met through GPU driver emulation.

Curious to try other Raspberry Pi compatible apps, I got Pi-Apps and started browsing. Lo and behold I found blockbench (BB), a simple 3D modeling app. I had never heard of it, but without many other options on my shiny new Pi 5 to try, I give it a go. At first launch it ran at full screen and still runs fairly slow and not really fun to model with. It was about 15-20 FPS at 1440p... yes there's an on screen fps counter by default! So I just made the window smaller, and voila, usable. So I spend some time with my shiny new tool, both on and off the RPi I found it on, I learn the basics and made some reasonable assets.

I think there's a tendency to get overly excited when finding a new tool to want to switch everything over and do it all a new way, and I was getting caught up in that excitement. I even taught my kids how to use the tool. Which is great! It does seem like it was made for minecraft which they love. But for the games I want to make some features weren't making sense for me to use. In particular animating, which is actually cool in BB for how simple it is. I keep realizing I don't really want to spend all my time on art, and when I do spend my time on art I want to do the parts I like. I intend to balance the coding, art and design work I do for my games. I'll buy sound and music packs!

Using BB has helped me come back to an idea to make several games with a single palette each. I think a nice palette may help set a mood, help with visual consistency and help make assets faster purely out of the restriction. This can help save me time to actually make games for personal fun, creativity and edification instead of market and work.

Journeying through game dev feels like a constant molding of thoughts and tools to work to get a final product. I've felt pretty lame since I haven't released my own personal game in almost 9 years now. I'm rarely using skillsets I want to during work these days so there's a lot less satisfaction there, and am trying to make up for it with my hobby projects.