The game jam was something else. It was rough in many ways, and resulted in quite a bit of drama, but it was something that needed to happen in the end. We all got stressed, had moments of doubt and loss of motivation, but also a huge turn out, great game results by the end, and a much more connected community overall.

To see the way people came together and supported one another through all the shit was great. Despite the flaws, this was a great return to game jams both for s&box, and myself. It was great because a lot of pain and learning had occurred for everyone, Facepunch included. I see this as a valuable lesson and an ultimate win.

I wish I could've done a bit better on my entry here, as I was around maybe the mid 200s, but unfortunately I had many shortcomings that I've realized. Thankfully, the game jam pushed me to actually finally release something for once, so I appreciate the experience in the end.

I've begun work on the first tool to get this game off its feet. What I presented was a concept of what I truly wanted as a game. I've realized that my UI is one of the many things I was able to make a bit more fancy without custom artwork, but it's far from what I want it to be. It does not represent the final product at all.

As a result, while UI isn't actually the most important part of my project, it's the first thing I'm doing to dip my toes into custom tools for my projects. This tool is called Paintbox. It's meant to act as a tool for making something as small as a simple static SVG icon, all the way up to a full fledged animated UI menu network, all handled without any code. I can place effects, animate custom pathing, movement, state transitions and more all through curves and keyframes, but also node graphs. This tool will be built entirely for developing UI with zero code, and at the same time, generate code if I wish it to. I want it to be extremely simple, performant, and handle UI for this and many other games in the future, so the tool needs to be good. Below you'll find some random examples of the tool in its current state as of this post.

As a result, this tool may not be public for a lengthy period of time. It has to be stress tested in all aspects. The workflow has to make at least some sort of sense. I'll need to produce tutorials, but make things easy to just jump in and get creative. Below, I will list the tools that I plan on creating both on the dev end, and the player facing end.

Dev Tools
- Paintbox (Full icon and UI designer)
- Custom bone rig creator
- Custom animation designer/procedural animation generator
- Modeling system

Player Tools (Runtime/Active play features)
- Similar but restricted modeling system in-game for custom robot part designs
- In-depth texture painter for individual parts
- Stage builder

The above tools for players are for extending customization as far as possible, while still keeping reason with min and max requirements to keep the game fair in a PvP environment.

I was given some feedback about the customization menu from a variety of players and felt I should push this update now. This is a first pass of the customization menu, I expect maybe 2 more passes if I don't end up taking the customization to the next level by then.

This image is the new customization menu. You can hover over the different parts and select them, but you also have a proper organized list of parts that are grouped together. You can create custom groups as well, and selecting the group will select all objects at once. You can also multi-select, and controls are easier to see in one spot. It's been reorganized and functions a ton better as a result, though it does have a few issues of its own still. Presets are no longer a separate bar at the bottom, they display in the same menu now.

Let me know what you guys think of the new menu layout, hopefully it's a lot less jank than before.

Not gonna lie, I already wrote this section out once and it deleted itself cause I changed the order of it. Kind of annoyed about that cause I don't remember exactly what I said, but I'll try.

My plans don't stop here with my game. I want to continue it, but I need to build the tools I listed above and potentially a few others over time to actually get this game where it needs to be. It unfortunately means making the actual games will slow down for a little bit, but I'll try to push out some small updates where I can, when I can. I have big plans for this and many future titles, so hopefully I can bring those to life easier with the tooling I have incoming.

I don't have a discord setup yet, but I plan on doing that sometime soon hopefully. It'll contain occasional updates for tools and projects, as well as side projects from time to time to keep things fresh for me, so it'd be great to see you guys there when I get to it. I'll likely make a second news post about that and a few other things later.

This is just the start of my return to game dev after many years being away, it's felt great to finally come back to it, and I want to keep this going. I hope you guys can stick around and support me on my journey. I and my games are in a rough state today, but I want to make them shine so that you and many others can have more games to enjoy.

I don't really know how else to end this off right now, so I'll just say see you in my next post when I can remember what I wanted to say, and when I have more stuff to post about.