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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   133 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 3, 2026

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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I decided to switch things up a little bit, and come back to this project for a bit. For now I was mostly refreshing my memory, but the current goal is to add animation to these gpu-controlled sprites. I was also experimenting with generating assets with AI, but so far the effects were very meh.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Thanks for asking, had a good run.

Figured out my collision troubles were due to me earlier fixing a load-bearing bug that applied scaling twice to the colliders. So now they were woefully undersized, and collisions barely happened because everything only a fraction of its intended size. With that handled, I spent a little more time tweaking my UI and player movement, and moved on to visuals. Which mostly involved me trying to get a grip on Unreal's particle system (called Niagara), which took a while. Because unlike Unity or Godot, where you can just instantiate particle systems from code, Unreal seemingly insists on you using their visual scripting for this. If there's a way around it, I haven't found it yet. But I got it to work, messy as the learning process was, so now I have stars winking in and out of sight, and a slow-mo bubbling sun. Doesn't look like much, but it meets the very modest goals I set for myself.

Right now I'm doing another round of refactors to clean up all the debris from the previous processes. I'm leaving it to the copilot (GPT-5.2, really) and just giving rough directions, and it seems to work. Since it's just rejiggering my own code and not writing any from scratch, it doesn't look too bad. It also helped a lot that I made it write a To-Do-List first and then just kept telling it to go by that list. The more I treat it like a kid with ADHD, the more it seems to work out.

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