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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3mo ago (text post)   478 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 23, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Futzing around with force myography for gesture recognition. I'm not convinced it's better (or even 'good enough') compared to electromyography, but if I can get anything workable, it seems likely to be a lot more comfortable for prolonged wear.

The refactoring worked! I'm taking a goddamn battleaxe to the import code, it's amazing! It's so good I'm wondering if I'm retarded for not having set everything up this way from the get-go or if it's "just make it exist first, you can make it good later" working as intended. If it's the latter, I'm still a bit salty with myself about not planning it out right, as I already have ~50K Tweets stored, so I have to write a script to migrate them to the new data structure, but I suppose better this than the paralysis-by-analysis that I'm prone to.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Thanks for asking, as always.

I had an opportunity to sit down for about two hours, uninterrupted and not dog tired, and lo and behold that actually let me take a good enough look at my codebase to figure out what I was doing wrong. It wasn't Unreal's fault after all. Of course not, in the end it's the world's most successfully used game engine, of course it works and it's the user's fault. I had simply botched a refactor and dropped a few lines that ended up missing entirely.

So I went on, thinking hey, now I can finally do something moderately creative! But hey, what's that, my projectiles don't collide with terrain or other geometry. Let's check...colliders look okay, meshes look okay, movement components look okay, what's going on here...

...as it turns out, it's Unreal's fault. Apparently ProjectileMovementComponent doesn't detect collisions if the collider isn't the actor's RootComponent. And I had written a custom RootComponent that I put in charge of situationally instantiating subcomponents, including said collider and the MovementComponent. Sad. So my options now are:

  • Always make the collider the root. But that leaves a blank spot for actors that shouldn't have a collider, and they'd have to be treated differently. But I guess I have to do that anyways.
  • Let my custom RootComponent inherit from collider. Wait, no, that won't work because there are separate collider classes for each primitive shape. And also doesn't account for acotrs that shouldn't collide.
  • Write my own MovementComponent that doesn't require this specific setup.
  • Attempt to fix Unreal's MovementComponent and hope they accept my changes, most likely only to learn that it has to be the way it is and I am abjectly ignorant of the many good reasons.

So I'll probably have to write a bunch of extra code to differentiate between actors with and such without a collider. Annoying.

I am working on making my own video game... for the third time. I've started and abandoned projects like this in the past, mostly because I got bogged down in pedantic issues like making menus and saving/loading that were boring but necessary and didn't get to the actual fun part of my game design ideas, until I got bored.

I have slightly higher hopes for this one, partly because Chat GPT is making things a lot easier. I am self-taught at programming, so there's a whole bunch of features and functions that I just don't know exist or syntax that I don't remember, and I can just ask it "how do I do this?" or "I can think of three ways to solve this problem, which is considered best practice?" and it can give advice much faster than trying to dig through google and stack exchange, and often give me code snippets I can copy/paste for my specific use case. I'm finding the overall experience to be much less frustrating than before.

For the game itself, the idea is a roguelite dungeon crawler combining elements of Blue Prince, Stuck in Time, and Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. The idea being you have an RPG character with stats, you run around in a dungeon that you generate room by room by choosing one of three options and having to rotate and snap doors together, and then you do actions in each room which have a chance to pass based on your stats and cards you play to temporarily boost them against a difficulty. Each movement, room draft, or action costs you time and energy resources, failures cost health or have other negative consequences, and if you run out you die and have to restart. But with permanent meta-progress. Each unique room/action combination has a familiarity level which goes up each time you do it, and it costs you less energy based on its familiarity level. Additionally, while many of the actions give you more resources and short term powerups within a run, some of them instead cost bunches of resources but reward you with permanent meta rewards making you permanently stronger. So you run through the dungeon over and over again getting a little stronger each time, making it a little further and unlocking a little bit more.

This is one of my favorite gameplay loops in roguelites and dungeon crawlers in general. I know a lot of people don't like grinding, but I love it if it accomplishes a certain balance between grind and skill, where your progress is determined by a combination of how much stuff you've unlocked and how well you do, and doing well gives you more rewards faster. I don't expect the game to ever get polished to a point of commercial viability. Maybe if it reaches a sufficiently playable state I'll present it for free on GitHub. But the primary goal is just to make my own perfect game tailor-designed towards my own preferences where I can keep adding more content and more upgrades whenever I reach the end.

What is the technology you're going to build on top of? I'm not very much into roguelites but Pathfinder Adventure Card game sounds intriguing.

I'm not building on top of anything. Everything is from scratch in python. Which might be a mistake, I dunno. I'm definitely not having fun making menus drawing rectangles and stuff and it looks super low quality so far. But this way I have total control over the code. Also part of the point is to get better at python for career purposes, so it's hopefully good practice.

It might be good practice for building wheels from scratch, but your future job probably wouldn't like you to do that, they'd want you to know what different wheel brands are good for and which ones to use.

That's certainly a choice. If you can keep it up it's great to own the majority of code. I'm generally in favor of keeping my dependencies few and small.

I'm exploring the browser as a platform to create small games. That's a huge dependency but maybe it means I actually get to a state of shipping something. :-)

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