Feels good to get something released, even if it's not actually a game. It's more of a little experimental thing.

I guess this thing demands some context. What started out as a copy of Observer’s Wisdom became a sort of sandbox project where I could try done new things out: Puppet animation with Spine, implementing voice lines, GSLS shaders, some programming tricks, and even a different approach to gamedev. For anyone who cares about that technical stuff like I do, the rest of this blog post will dive into it.

The idea is just that you get a new quote of "wisdom" each day. The RNG seed used to pick the wisdom is set based on the date. The pool of wisdoms is divided into groups for each day of the month so that repeats are at least less frequent.

Just to learn how to do it, I also added two features I hope to use more substantially in other projects. (Though currently broken,) it's possible to send someone a custom wisdom by encoding it as a hash in the URL. It's also possible for me to add wisdoms for a specified date in the ProjectVars on NG without having to update the game itself.

This game also has adaptive resolution. If you play it on a mobile device, it'll change it's resolution to whatever space is available, accounting for whatever aspect ratio. Try flipping your phone to switch between portrait to landscape. The game camera zooms accordingly so everything you need to see fits nicely in whatever window size. I haven't thoroughly tested this across devices, so let me know if it's not right on your end.

The rigged puppet animation was done was done in Spine. I bought the license with the money I got from Highschool Bathroom Simulator winning monthly 3rd place 5 whole years ago. I never used it in an actual release that whole time, partly because of difficulties implementing the runtime. Spine specializes in smooth, tweened animation, but I find it's hard to not make that type of animation look cheap. Blocked animation was my shortcut to making it look good enough quickly. That's also why the project stars a wizard with a barely visible mouth. Lip syncing is the last thing I wanna do, especially since the tier of Spine I paid for doesn't include an audio preview tool. That required a painful workaround, which is part of the reason there are just a few voicelines you'll hear repeated when you revisit the wizard. There are a lot of voicelines in the game files, but I only managed to animate eight of them. Animation takes a lot of time, who knew?

I almost fell down the rabbithole of GSLS shaders, but thankfully settled for lightly modifying an example shader someone else made. But getting a shader implemented at all opens the door to some exciting possibilities for future projects.

I know this weird little project is nothing to write home about, but it gave me some new tools in my belt I'm excited about. I consider it a step towards more stuff I'll hopefully get to share with you guys soon.

NG4EVA.