I've set up the Radios On game in Godot and already further in than I was with the browser based JavaScript. I worked through a few more dialog options. I'm not completely sold on any of them, but in playing through Rosewater (the long awaited western adventure point and click) I am learning and refining what I like and don't like as far as dialog options go.

The dialog manager plugin seems like it is going to work really well. Here's a video clip of the basic system in my test scene:

Here are some mocked interaction stylings that I can use to replace the existing style while still using the system:

After having a great conversation about possible gameplay rules relating to food and inventories, I worked through Inventories, Radio, Notebook gameplay mechanics, and have those three things as my main goals for programming what will end up being the early early alpha demo for early gameplay testers to give feedback.

Hopefully more to share later in the month or early May!

In February and into March, I started playing with Code Architecture Agents with Tool Use. Things like Claude Code, as well as Aider. I made a proof of concept of Radios On using phaser.js, but kept running into issues with getting UI layers to show and hide. The console logs would show everything was working but still nothing displayed.

In the end, I realized that I need to just learn one of the major engine tools (UE, Unity, Godot, etc). A year or so ago I started learning Godot engine, and the work I did on the prototype with phaser.js helped me significantly in understanding the building blocks. So it wasnt all for nothing.

Also under that column of learning things for a more productive future:

• learning how to make style and character LoRAs
• getting those LoRAs working in Krita locally
• Figuring out more of the tooling for future NPC/gameplay conversation generation

One other thing is that I started playing around with what do for cutscenes, more on this next month.

Another thing that I also dug into is the Popochiu plugin for Godot, with my new experience from the prototyping, I thought a lot about UI interface and player interactions. Popochiu has a few built in Classic Adventure game UI interfaces, and theres a few more planned.

I made some good visible progress too. I created a bunch of NPC portraits and also started in on inventory item pictures too. April will be here soon enough.

In January 2025 I continued work on "Radios On", but fate intervened and not much progress was made.

My son Henry was born this month and naturally a significant amount of time has been spent on the steep learning curve of taking care of an infant.

I'm now back to getting at least 3 or 4 hours of sleep each night, so I anticipate more writing to happen this month than last.

in 2024 I worked on two games. The first was Unicon Rescue, currently available to play at catphonics.com. This game was made with react and purely clientside to make it fast. I got quite a bit of feedback from friends and family for future iterations. I abstracted the game rules from the code so I might make a new version in godot or unity as I keep learning.

The second game is titled "Radios On" and started out as a book idea 8 years ago and now I am slowly working on it as a game. I have much of the pre-production work completed, except for the biggest thing which is the full script.

I made game ui, style, character mockups, and have been working on flushing out the maps and backgrounds.

Like many other years, lots of ideas sat on the back burner while paying work came first. Despite the slow going, I'm optimistic about making significant progress in 2025.