BASICALLY READY TO SHIP!!!
I whipped up a quick demo that generates a 5x5 random room that you can spin around with the crank!
I also implemented some basic docs using markdown to explain the basic usage of the API! (the docs are very simple rn, but I encourage you to actually read some of the source code and modify it to suit your needs if you feel you need a special feature out of it or just want more understanding to how it works)
I just gotta make the README actually READable, Make a demo video, and clean up the documentation a little more and then profit!

PREPARING FOR FIRST SHIP!!!

I’m gonna ship the first part of CLEAR-ENGINE, the rendering engine!
After thinking about this for a while, I decided I want to ship my beautiful framework in multiple parts, with multiple stages of completion, and the first part is basically done!
The rendering engine consists of a bunch of math to render all tiles relative to eachother in a cool way to make it look 3D, complete with a simple API to interface with it and full 360 Degree rotation support!
To be fully ready for the ship, I need to do the following:

• expand the API a bit more
• make and render a couple more demo tiles
• make a simple demo project to show off the awesome functionality I made!
• make some docs

I also do currently have my character and action systems in the works, but I will remove those from the demo and will not include those in the docs for now since those are goals for the next two ships I’ll do.

“oh my god he’s actually being productive…”
- the random person in the mirror

CLEAR ENGINE Devlog #3

wait… what happened to CLEAR?
So CLEAR was going to be a turn-based strategy game based on Ready Or Not combined with Tactical Breach Wizards, but I realized two things:

1. I can’t make good art. period.
2. The scope of this project is way more than something doable in the duration remaining of Stardance.

Luckily there’s some good news!

I am a pretty skilled coder, so I decided to just take everything I have so far and turn it into a framework that anyone can use to make their cool 3D-ish turn-based games for the playdate! (I know, very mainstream right?)
so that’s the new goal:

• I need to unify all of my different APIs into one usable API
• I need to make docs 😭
• I need to add some features like

  • A working state system with a planning, action, and response phase.

  • Better art importing systems

  • An easy character making system via custom lua files

  • A demo for the ship

  • more stuff I don’t really want to do!

CLEAR Devlog #2

The Tile Rendering Engine is DONE!*

*hopefully
Now, tiles can render next to each other with no issues, and with 8 tiles in the scene while spinning it manages a SOLID 30FPS!!! The best part is, that’s with the FPS cap set to 30, so I bet I can push 40, or maybe even optimize it enough to get 50!
I also added distance sorting, so the tiles that are the farthest away from the “camera” get drawn first and so forth so that everything appears normal when overlapping.
Finally, I also completely restructured the entire game so far and moved all the tile stuff to it’s own file, to declutter my main.lua script.

CLEAR Devlog #1!

so what actually is CLEAR?

CLEAR is an isometric (ish) turn-based action strategy game that is essentially a cross between Ready Or Not and Tactical Breach Wizards (would 10/10 recommend). The game flow is something like this:

• Your turn! you can:
  • Move any of your teammates
  • Do any of your characters’ actions that you can do based on their mana and turn levels
• Then you end your turn and the enemy plays:
  • They will move, attack, and use abilities to try to defeat your team
• Repeat! (until either your team is wiped out, the objective is complete, or all enemies are defeated)

Features:

• Fog of war! You can’t see anything your characters can’t actively see.
• Multiple missions
• multiple selectable characters to build your team
• Arco inspired skill tree
• Cool 1-Bit artstyle
• Oh, and did I mention it’s (for now) EXCLUSIVELY for the https://play.date!
  Right now I have spent my time working on the rendering engine, that should be done by the next one! (optimization sucks… sigh)