DEVBLOG #0: A wild Pokedex appeared in your desktop…?

Owning your own complete pokedex is a dream of any child as well as of any Pokemon geeks, and I’ve been both once. However though, spending money on a toy-pokedex is not something wise 😭. So why not build one?

But I suck at anything electronics… so I decided to make a virtual pokedex for my desktop, inspired by those cool widgets we had in ol’ Windows 7! 😌

I started off by planning how the final project must look like (check it below), though I’m pretty sure it’s a bit over-ambitious, but it’s worth a shot! 👍👍

Then I opened Godot 4 (yes, you can make non-game applications in it, its bit popular for that) and started working on the first thing; TRANSPARENT INTERACTIBLE WINDOWS.

It wasn’t a huge hassle, since Godot offers transparent, borderless window settings out of the box, and takes up 50% of the work… but there’s still the other 50%; handling interactions of both the desktop and the pokedex.

See, either your Godot game must be opaque and clickable or, it must be transparent and clickthrough-able. It’s possible to make the window transparent and clickthrough-able, while making the pokedex interactable, thanks to “passthrough polygons”: these are areas where the game window can detect interactions and inputs, instead of ignoring it.

By setting a demo sprite’s area passthrough and making it draggable, I accomplished my first step of the pokedex; making sure that a transparent floating pokedex is actually possible in Godot (here’s a demo of how it looks like!). And Godot never fails to baffle me. 📈📈📈

I don’t get much time to work on this, and I might give up after making a barely working prototype… but let’s see how long I would work on it until I do so.

Sooo… yeah that’s it!
Toodles