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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   244 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for August 11th, 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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Didn't do much in terms of code, but for a change of pace I started working on a story board for the game's intro. I think I'm about 50% done.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Thanks for asking, as always.

Doubled back and completely reworked my UI from the ground up to use custom C++ clases derived from Unreal's native UI widget classes, instead of composing UserWidgets out of native elements. They're still exactly as reusable as before, but now I can nest them without the need for intermediary "slot" elements that cluttered up the hierarchy. To still be able to WYSIWYG the design of those elements, I introduced a Style data asset that I can edit in the editor without needing to tweak anything in C++. Best of both worlds, it seems. I'm sure I'll realize somewhere down the line why this was dumb, but for now it looks good.

Then I did some more backend work to make sure that everything from the main menu to the strategic game mode to the combat game mode flowed nicely, including loading screens. Nothing fancy, literally just empty levels, completely black, that present "Loading." in the center of the screen. Added a menu to select from three different levels for the combat mode: one fully procedural, one fully pre-generated, and one with procedural landscape but pregenerated lighting. Then I spawned my first "enemy" into the combat level, and he promptly fell over, being a mere capsule with a rectangular "gun" sticking out, and could not get back up, lacking any sort of self-righting ability or indeed any behavior at all. I then wrote some stubs for exactly that behavior, and for the perception logic of combatants, and called it a day, and indeed a one-and-a-half weeks, since I'll be going on vacation tomorrow.

Didn't do much in terms of code, but for a change of pace I started working on a story board for the game's intro. I think I'm about 50% done.

Whoa. I didn't see that one coming. What's your workflow there?

Whoa. I didn't see that one coming. What's your workflow there?

A combination of modest ambitions, and AI slop. I'm planning to tell the whole story with handful of stills, and some spoken dialogue. The workflow is:

  • generate a sketch
  • throw it into PowerPoint (most of the dedicated storyboard software was either overkill, or expected me to be able to draw, rather than import a ready image)
  • write dialogue

The middle section of the story is 90% reusing the same sketch (there will be some animated details, but here I'm just describing them, rather than showing them explicitly). Most of the variation / actual work is in the beginning, to establish the scene, and will be at the tail end of it, with a little montage of the protagonist preparing for the alien invasion.

It's also possible that I'm overestimating my progress, let's see.

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