Backend work

Alright, it’s been a while since I’ve worked on this, and coming back I realize that I knew so little about any of how drives, media, filesystems, and all that works. So, I’m going to give a quick synopsis of all I’ve learned (keep in mind, this all applies to LINUX ONLY since that’s what I’m on, the app will come to windows eventually but for the time being I’m not worrying about it):

Storage devices are where your computer stores data for storage. One physical device (i.e. a thumb drive) corresponds to one drive, although some physical devices can have multiple drives. These drives are split into BlockDevices, so one drive can have many Block Devices. Block devices can have one or none filesystems; keep in mind there isn’t one universal filesystem that everybody agreed to use so we could all be happy; you’re gonna have to deal with FAT32, NTFS, ext4, exfat and btrfs at a minimum. Now, those filesystems aren’t immediately accessible; they need to be mounted, which esentially means just putting it somewhere in another filesystem on your computer, probably the main one, like your HDD/SSD. A single blockdevice can have many mount points, each with different permissions; one might have NOEXEC permissions so you can’t launch a game from there, another might have RO so you can’t write anything to it. Keep in mind, these permissions are completely separate from file and directory permissions; those are a whole ’nother can of worms.

Basically, Physical Device -> Drive[], Drive -> BlockDevice[], BlockDevice -> Filesystem?, Filesystem -> (MountPath, Permissions)[]. That’s the really really really big oversimplification but yeah. If you read to here, hopefully you know understand my pain; I commend your patience.

game
Most of the time here has been transferring stuff over to be honest and a lot less of actual coding, but turns out the editor needed some pretty major changes (yeah i know i just made it lol)

anyways below is a screenshot of what i’ve been starting to do

New UI, massively improved backend API

To be honest basically all of this devlog was backend, but I’m really happy with how it is now! The time I’ve spent learning rust (there’s a lot of stuff lol) paid off and now I can easily expand the format and add new features whenever I please!

For stuff that you can actually see, here’s a new concept UI I made. I’m not at all a designer and I deliberately made this project backend/API focused so that better designers than me could be the ones making actually nice looking apps, but i’m pretty happy with how it looks right now!

The last major feature I need to add is animated banners. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any great formats for this, but I’m planning on expirementing with Lottie as it seems like the closest option to what I want. There’ll still be video and static image support, of course, but animated banners are objectively way cooler. Anyways, yeah that’s what I’m gonna focus on next devlog. After that, I’ll do a round of polishing but that should be the first version (call it alpha maybe?) of the app finished! Very happy with the progress :)

(see app and json schema preview below)

new stuff
alr tbh I’ve just been experimenting w/ a lot of random stuff but I added some stuff like links, previews, and icons, and more stuff! Honestly I’m thinking of revamping this website to have a more unique look, right now it kind of looks like typical tech bro ai something (even tho esentially none of the code is ai) and I want this site to be more personal to me than it is a show off site or anything. Anyways we’ll see ig

an actually good demo next devlog i promise

Ok the reason this count is so high is because I spent a diabolical amount of time researching, practicing and learning a bunch of new things. I had never done asynchronous or concurrency before, and now I’m slightly ok at it!!! yippee!! Anyways, under the hood we use events (via UDisks2 and d-bus which was a whole other can of worms) now instead of lsblk to detect when a usb goes in and out so that’ll be a lot more responsive. On that note, I still gotta code windows support (I’m on linux) but I think windows, just by nature of not being linux and having 20 billion different ways to do everything will be a lot easier. mac also exists but uhh erm idk i don’t really wanna do allat

(picture is some random ahh code cuz i have no new ui in the slightest lol)

tbh the majority of these hours have been learning rust, so i’m just gonna explain the project:

I’m trying to make a standardized format + launcher for physical pc games. the idea is you’ll just be able to plug in a usb, it’ll get detected and you can click a button to run the game! I also want it to have support for animated banners, metadata, all that stuff. Basically just think like how the wii did it lol

anyways next log hopefully i’ll have some gui, even if its just a test. cyall then

img is the tentative format

WEB EXPORT LETS GOOO

so i just spent the last 4 hours (many hours aren’t shown here bc they were reading/in a diff project) bashing my head against a wall to get raylib-cs to export to web.

first of all, i had to build from source to get the most recent merged pr, then i had to refactor my fundamental engine code to work with requestAnimationFrame, then i bugfixed for like 2 hours straight, BUT IT NOW WORKS!!! I HAVE A BLUE CIRCLE IN MY WEB BROWSER HELL YEAAAAAAAA

also the attempt it worked fully was when i got 42069 localhost ip lol

Learning HTML, CSS, and JS for my personal website!!

Theres not a ton to say for this devlog, as most of the hours I spent here was just tinkering with all these web technologies that I’ve never used before. There are a couple things though:

I want my website to be a chill/unserious portfolio website, and importantly I want it to be themed around rainbow coloring! You can’t see it on the still image, but that border and the tiny . in “dylz.net” are both constantly shifting colors in a rainbow fashion. Next devlog I’ll add a custom rainbow cursor (to test my JS skills mostly lol) and eventually i want to add some text saying “my favorite color is rainbow” where the rainbow is stylized as the fancy swaying rainbow text you see in videogames. Anyways that’s it, see y’all in the next log!

The game is done (fr)
Ok, so when I submitted this to GMTK, I built it wrong, so I ended up placing poorly (obviously due to lack of having a runnable executable), but I’m really happy with the game! That was about a week ago by the way, I went on a vacation almost immediately after the jam ended and now I’m back and wrapping things up. Anyways, I’ll open-source the github, commit the final changes, and yeah, that’ll be it!

Have fun playing CHRONOTAMEION (jam version, might make a new game based off it!)

THE GAME IS (almost) DONE

I did a lot, but since I want to get all my hours I’m going to make a quick devlog here. Static effect, enemies, level generation, tons of level design, balancing, inputs, and more! Very fun time, will post the link to the game in my next devlog :)

more work, will post more tommorow once the game is done but here’s some furniture:

GHOUL GAME

Honestly, I don’t have a lot because art assets are still underway and we’ve been working slowly BUT I have a sick ass dithering and occlusion effects. Anyways ima go to bed i’ll have more upds later

Basic setup

Not much to show here, just setting up the repo and everything for GMTK on Wednesday! Figured I might as well log the hours.

THE EDITOR
admittedly this was done a couple of days ago i lowk forgor

ANYWAYS now we have a level editor yippee!! I’m very happy with it, all you have to do is decorate a property in a class with ExportAttribute and badabing badaboom it’ll appear in the editor!

There’s still a lot more work to be done, I had my friend review the code and there are a good amount of changes I need to make, but honestly I think the base I’ve made for myself is shockingly good, I’m very content! The images below should illustrate how it all works, it’s 11pm, I’m going to bed.

Oh also, there might not be a devlog on this project for a while – GMTK is coming up and I’m gonna be spending a crap ton of time on that and you can bet your bottom dollar I’m getting hours and devlogs from that. That begins on wednesday, take a look at those devlogs if you’re interested :)

Daily Devlog 7/15/26 - UI… i guess

I added a bunch of UI components behind the scenes and more work on the editor. Didn’t get as much time to work today as I’d hoped but I do actually have something to show (even if it is just a textbox lol)

Daily Devlog 7/14/26 – Even MORE editor stuff + training

Alright, today was definitely less productive than yesterday, but I still got a good amount of stuff done.

First of all, the Editor code is very close to being finished! I refactored basically all of it and I’m really proud of how it turned out; genuinely some of the cleanest large-scale code I’ve written basically ever. Very happy with that! Tomorrow, I’ll actually have something to show for all of it 100%; cannot wait for that!

Second of all, I’ve been teaching my friend C#, raylib, and how to work with/contribute to the codebase! I’m not a great teacher so I can’t say it’s the smoothest thing, but progress is no doubt being made. Hopefully once he’s all caught up, we’ll be able to make this game 2x faster than before.

That’s all, see y’all tommorow!

see below the Read/Write functions for the EntityMap (the entities) of the level (at least a high-level abstraction of them ig)

Daily Devlog 7/13/26 – More editor stuff

Alright, today there really isn’t anything much to add. I will say, C# source (ok actually incremental but you get what i mean) generators are very cool. That’s what I’ve been using to avoid reflection when making classes acessable, editable, loadable and saveable in the editor and it’s been great. 1000% recommend over reflection any day of the week unless you definitely don’t need the like 100x performance gains.

Anyways, hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to actually finish up an early version of the editor and show y’all what it actually looks like! See you all then :)

see below – lambdas, discards, syntax trees, LINQ, and pattern matching all in one function call. doesn’t get more C# than this.

Sprite packing, teaching, etc.

Honestly, everything I did is still backend, so nothing super interesting to report on. Lots of the hours here was teaching my friend proficiency with C# and general gamedev/SWE practices, but I still do have some stuff to share!

I have an irrational hatred of dictionaries.

So, while a normal human might be inclined to create a Dict<string, Sprite>, I made a whole seperate project that packs sprites into a texture atlas and makes a slightly absurd amount of properties so you can statically access every one! Honestly, it works very well and makes sprites super easy to use – I know manually writing out a .cs file is a little odd, but hey, if it works it works.

Side note, I switched to linux!

After windows decided to randomly lock me out of my laptop for an hour because it “detected odd activity”, I decided to finally bite the bullet and just install Linux. And it’s been pretty good! Honestly, everything is very tranferable from Windows, at least for a programmer, it’s a shockingly easy switch. Also it’s fun using the terminal more often and feeling like a hacker lol. Currently running Fedora w/ KDE Plasma for anyone who’s curious, although I think I’m going to switch to either Arch or Debian, I’m not super content with the dnf package manager or Red hat, altho I will say KDE Plasma is great.

Alright, I’m going to wrap this up early(ish) b/c I still have a days of coding ahead of me (I just realized that it stops counting after 10hrs)
Oh last thing – I’m going to start doing daily devlogs to track my progress a bit more accurately as me and my friend start to lock in more. Look forward to seeing you guys later today then!

Devlog 1 - Level Editor, Collision, Sprite Management and more!!!!

(god that’s a lot of hours i hope most of it was afk)
Alright, it’s been a while since my first devlog but for good reason! I’ve done a metric ton of stuff since then, literally none of which you will actually see as a player! Anyways, I’ll split this up into sections as usual.

Level Editor

Alright, this obviously comes pre-packaged with tilemap & tileset loading, file saving, compression, ids, and all of that, but I’ll try to just focus on the interesting things – firstly, my

Autotiling system!

Because most of the walls in my (top down) game are going to be quite simple, I’ve decided to go with a 16-piece tileset for most of them. Basically, there are 16 different tiles representing what each tile looks like depending on what’s around it – one for having one filled tile to the north only, another for having a tile to the south and east. These tiles can be uniquely represented by essentially assigning a binary flag to each of the four cardinal directions – North -> 1, East -> 2, South -> 4, etc.

Now normally, you’d use a table, maybe a switch case, to match these up with their respective tiles… but I’m lazy and didn’t want to code all of that. Instead, I just decided to force the tile set to be in order so the id mathematically correlates directly to the tile’s position in the tileset! To visualize this, look at the (row-major) ordered tileset image I’ve included. The first 8x8 square is 0 – no filled tiles around it, the second is 1 – representing the tile to the north being filled… you can check this for every one, it all works out.

Collision

Ok, this one’s a lot more simple. The tilemap is stored in the code fundamentally as a grid of ids – 0 = air, anything else means full. To check if a player is colliding with one of these tiles, we just see what grid tiles the player would be colliding with, calculate the grid positions of those places from the world positions, and if those places are full we have a collision! There’s a bit more to it than that because you have to actually handle the collision afterwards but that’s the gist.

Sprite Management

Ok, this one’s pretty simple. At first, I was thinking of assigning each sprite in my game a UUID. But then I realized I wouldn’t using the first U (they don’t need to be universally unique), and sequential would be better, so now I have a sequentially id’d way to get sprites, woohoo. I still have to hook it up to some automation (it would NOT be fun to manually add a new id constant for every sprite in the future), but the core is done.

Alright, I omitted a lot of stuff but I’ve already spent an unusually high amount of effort writing this, so I’ll stop there. Next devlog will hopefully be a lot smaller – refining the tilemap system and adding entities to the editor so I can add props and whatnot. See you all on the other side!