Project Status

Phew. It's been quite a week. I have lots of updates to report for Grogbeard as we continue this development journey together.

Release Date

Grogbeard has taken on a life of its own, and while I've made good progress, I want to make sure to do right by him. I hope to release an "Early Access" quality demo of the first two levels in the coming weeks, to be followed by a full release later this year.

Latest Progress

As part of my 2024 Game Dev Challenge, I misjudged the time it would take to build a project of this magnitude, and I've learned a lot through the process of developing its engine. Some of the latest accomplishments include:

• Started switching the code to an Entity-Component-System approach
• Continued improvement of my custom Tiled map importer
• Created a basic enemy fighting AI that isn't actually too bad
• Built a custom cutscene handler for animating sprites and transitioning dialog
• An actual title screen!
• Completed basic scripting and layout of the first TWO levels, they just need more artwork and a few tweaks

What's Next?

Work will continue on Grogbeard, and I hope to have a playable demo ready soon. Part of my original challenge was to produce a game every month -- and so far this one's taken about 7 weeks! So yeah, I misjudged the amount of work it would need. But that's the whole point of this exercise: learn the process inside and out, learn the Panda3D engine, and develop my knowledge and codebase to be able to make better games faster!

I've got tons of ideas for Grogbeard that I still want to develop. I'm fighting my perfectionist urges on this one because of course I want Grogbeard to be the best it can be, but without it halting my progress on this challenge and being able to move onto different styles of game and learning new things!

So stay tuned! I have a few more pieces of the engine framework to code up, otherwise the majority of the work will be in art, writing and level design. I'll keep working on Grogbeard in parallel with my other games, just at a slower pace, so watch for the demo in the next few weeks!