Status of the project @2021-04-30

Hello everyone, time for another (minor) status update!

I wanted this to be a weekly thing, but as usual work has not been kind to me.

So here we are, much later than I wanted to be, with some status updates!

More audio

I decided to undertake the study and simplification of ASDR envelopes, making explanatory images and giving a gentle introduction of one of the many themes used in audio synthesis and music.

I also decided to put a couple of basic rhythms in the "music" section of "Creating your own resources" to get people started with music making. I decided to use LMMS's beat editor to graphically explain them, since I think it's the clearest.

Miscellaneous game design section

This section was added specifically to address those game design topics that don't really fit the "tips and tricks" category. I decided to undertake a subject that many game developers (although in good faith) get wrong very often: the fact that you can't use the red cross in videogames (not legal advice).

UML Sequence Diagrams

I think Sequence Diagrams may be useful in this book to better explain how different objects can interact with each other, so I took some time to add an entire section dedicated on how to read these useful (and underused) diagrams.

More Math

Who wants more math? Probably very few people.

Who needs more math? We do.

I decided to add some notes and symbols at the beginning of the math section as a "refresher", as well as an easy-to-understand little reference guide for the rest of the book.

New game design tip

I went forward with adding a somewhat thorough section about 1-ups, since there have been games who got this wrong, this should give some pointers on how important 1-ups are in a "life system" as well as some suggestions on how to award them to the player.

New mechanic in detail

I decided to start working on describing how to implement (hopefully in an easy-to-understand way) inertia and acceleration, in the most generic way possible: this will give more depth to 2D platformers as well as space shooters.

Now I just need to write the code...

Normal Mapping

I decided to take a crack at understanding, explaining and teaching normal maps at a high level. Normal maps can prove to be difficult to understand, even more when we enter the world of graphic shaders.

This is meant to be something tending towards the "informative" more than being some kind of tutorial. Maybe in the future this can be expanded upon.

Various fixes

Among some fixes, there are some typos, some missing descriptions in the introduction, some under-the-hood fixes for the Epub release, allowed for usage of "lualatex" in the makefile by setting an environment variable, removing some TODOs that I even forgot existed...

Conclusions and plans for the future

As you can see, there have been a lot of things going on, scattered throughout the book (which is proof of how scatterbrained I can be), when I think that the edits will be stable and numerous enough to warrant a new release, expect an update!

In the nearest future, I want to completely rewrite the description of the Itch page, to make it clearer and feel less like a "wall of text" that may scare people off.

Also I want to review the whole book and eventually change some of the language towards being more "friendly" and less "professorial", this should make the book easier to read and understand.

As always, thank you very much for reading and I'll see you in the next update!

Penaz.