At the start of the month I had the pleasure of visiting Bhutan. A neighbouring country of India, known for beautiful peaks and elaborate monsatries. The oldest monastry over there was about 600 years old. We travelled by road to see most of Bhutan. While the drives were beautiful they were a bit excessive, as we were spending 3-5 hours everyday on road.

If you do plan on travelling to Bhutan I suggest you checkout the Tiger's Nest Monastry. This has taken it's place as one of my favourite hikes. Some might find the 800 meter elevation (total elevation) gruelling but it is well worth the climb. On the hike you will come across many 'Mani Walls', rock scultpures made for the blessing of Budha, hairy Brown Oak Trees, and breathtaking views of the Monastry. At the midway point is a very scenic coffee shop where travellers can rest and get perhaps the most enjoyable cup of coffee they have had. Of course, like any other mountain hike, you will come across the local guides i.e. the mountain dogs. I found one that was fond of scaling trees and observing the valley below.

This is possibly the most remote monastry in Bhutan with no roads except this excruciatingly steep trail in which you will inevitably find Budha yourself. At the monastry are 7 different rooms each with a different incarnation of Buddha, our local guide (actual human this time) insisted we go in all and receive the blessings of the different reincarnations. He told us that one is spiritually enlightened just by managing to visit these 7 incarnations in one day. Maybe it is a turning point as from here on I have looked more into our education system.

On the 20th of April, I started working with Rocket Learning, an NGO that facilitates the Aanganwadi sytem in India. An Aanganwadi is a local daycare center that provides nutrition and basic learning skills to kids between 3-6 years old. Rocket Learning helps by providing them with curriculums and activities to follow, they also help with support on an ideal meal plan for kids with the resources provided. Rocket Learning aims for equitable pre-school for kids all around India and regularly make visits to aanganwadis to conduct surveys and make reports. They have managed to reach over 40,000 Aanganwadis and over 4 million children.

Apart from this, I am working alongside Vidya School to facilitate math learning using Khanacademy a self-paced gamified math learning platform. Vidya School is another NGO. It is a public school that aims to provide private school level facilities to children who may not be so fortunate. They sponsor each individual child through public donations. The Khanacademy programme was in place a few years ago but was discontinued. From there they learned that they could easily identify children with exceptional math skills and could also use it to teach. The programme coordinators also discussed the potential for khanacademy to be the primary source for teaching math and the ability to easily scale without skilled labour i.e. teachers.

With these two different branches, I am more involved with the education sector in India. Hopefully in the future there will be scope to do something where I can create in impact in both games and education.

~sailboat642

Yesterday, I went for a social convention centered around animation, comics, and gaming. I honestly went there to see a tekken 8 tournament but ended up staying for the creators. I came across 'Black Valiant' an Indian manga-inspired comic. It blew me away, I could tell the characters had a lot of depth and really like the art style as well. I feel I came across something great and if anyone is interested in manga they should definitely give it a read.

And Now The Rant​

Generative AI is killing my craft. I have been using it to programme for two years now, and there is no doubt that there are projects that would never have been completed had it not been for my Gemini subscriptions. But have I actually become better as a programmer? I have been exposed to new things for sure, such as the painting simulator. But I cannot for the life of me recreate that. And then another thing. The Procedural Planet Generator I spent days making, following Sebastian Lague's process...ruined. I asked AI to help me save the mesh so I could use it in another project. After multiple iterations and tweaks to the actual mesh generator I managed to accompalish just that. But to my horror I could not generate any new meshes. I am sure if I revisit it, I will be able fix the bugs but when I will actually get down to it, I don't know. AI has spoilt a toy I was fond of and stained a project I was proud of.

Another issue is that it is inhibiting my creativity. Every problem has multiple solutions and to move forward I have to make a decision, decisions that the AI is making and not me. Decisions that impact the future design of the project. So everytime it makes a decision for me, it robs me of the design freedom, anlaysis of the pros and cons, learning opportunities for fundamentals.

Lastly, I don't feel like a better programmer. I cannot remember syntax that should be second nature for me. All these skills will come only from repeated practice. And using AI certainly will prevent just that.

So from here on out, all my endeavours will be 100% Human Intelligence.

~sailboat642

So far in all my games, UI has taken the backseat. And by backseat, I mean I stuff it in the boot at the last minute.

I just started listening to a podcast by Butterscotch Shenaningans and they spent 55 minutes talking about tooltips in their new game. Which goes to show how much developers think about the design even with a limited team of 3 people. And one of the things that I took from this conversation was how much little things matter in a good game. Putting a lot of time into these things is unrewarding as people will not notice that the text is spaced correctly and consistently or that the health bar is a certain style. The idea behind a good a game is not only novel things but also the absence of problems. People would not notice if a store is categorized proplerly but will definitely noticed if the goods are placed all over the store.

The trouble here is that this problem is fairly common and often complicated. Butterscotch Shenanigans spoke about text formatting for 40 minutes, and this whole time they were just listing out the problems. Which goes to show just how much thought you have to put into these matters for people not notice them. Unfortunately, most game engines do not have great in built functionality for UI. As a result many developers end up making their own in house packages or buying from the asset store. However every problem has multiple solutions, so once you start with a solution you better stick to it.

One of the most robust systems from UI is fortunately pretty easy to break into. It is HTML, you can easily define structures, the way they are nested and can apply pretty much any visual effect you can dream of. It already has functionality for state changes like hovers and clicks, and also resizes the component to the canvas pretty consistently. Together with Javascript we can also make it very dynamic which empowers us to move components around in an interesting way.

So this month I will look into Web Development more seriously, trying to make simple websites with fun aesthetics. And wouldn't you know it there is a web specific game jam this month with a very juicy prize pool. Gamedev.js

Podcast by Butterscotch Shenaningans

~sailboat642

The theme for this jam was Casino, further the organisers had included a casino game chosen at random for each participant to take inspiration from. For me, curiously it had landed in between two games, plinko and sic bo. Plinko is fairly simple and would allow more flexibility in designing the game, however, since I like dice I chose to adapt sic bo.

The design was fairly similar, this was sic bo set in a middle west environment where cowboys and rule breakers were common. You were a cowboy with dead eye aim and would be able to guess the outcome of the dice based on instincts, and had the quickness to shoot the dice midair to re-roll the dice.

I was excited to build and playtest this. I chose Babylonjs as I felt it would be a more efficient and space conserving build. I had looked at games made with babylonjs and was fairly certain it would be able to make this game possible. The platform had a physics engine havok which provided all the physics I need in the game, like gravity collisions and force.

The time for the Jam was 60 hours and I faced many obstacles, both because it was my first 3d jam and that the engine was new and difficult to deal with. I ran into problems at everycorner, from overlaying a UI layer to actually having a build that ran on Itch. Not to mention working with 3d filetypes, uv maps, and textures. Unfortunately, I did not end up with a build, however I do know it is possible to ship the prototype to a server and release it on my own domain so keep a look out!

~sailboat642

It has been a while since my last blog. The upcoming jam for this month is Imaginary Game Jam, let's see what the theme ends up being. The jam will start on 20th March, so pretty soon. One of the criterias for the jam is to use the characters made by Imaginary Game Studio somewhere in the game. As a freebie they are also including an asset pack that I can use to build my game. Looking forward to this as it will save a lot of time.

Apart from game jams I have started working on a game that I feel is commercially viable, as with any good game it will take some time and thought so keep your eyes open. I am planning to make it 2.5D unlike my other projects as such I have taken on learning Blender, so you will probably see a lot more 3D work on this website.

March is a fun month as we celebrated Holi, the Indian Festival of colors. There are many reasons to celebrate Holi, such as the onset of summer,and few tales that speak of devotion to Vishnu. It is my favourite holiday and is celebrated in various ways depending on the city. Normally it is celebrated by playfully colouring your close family and friends with Gulal, dry powdered colors. Ofcourse people get carried away and dunk people with water, spray each other with water pistols, and throw water balloons at each other. This festival is usually enjoyed amongst neighbors.

~sailboat642

On Feb 1st, 2026. The Indian Cabinet announced its support to 'Orange Economy' by encouraging AVGC content creation (Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, and Comics) and building formalised labs. This is of course is enormously encouraging to a Game Developer like me.

... the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday said that the government will support the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies, Mumbai to set up content creator labs across 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges. ...

The Hindu

Support like this from the government, especially in this industry, came as a suprise to me. I feel that I should answer this call by helping in any way I can. I plan to be involved with some schools in Gurgaon and, hopefully, with my alma matter, The Doon School. I am interested in education, and already have a few ideas that I would like to bounce around.

I hope this will give me the opportunity to experiment with Pico-8, a virtual emulator with its own game engine. The game engine includes all the raw tools a game developer needs, art, sound, and code. While the engine has a limit on code, the number of sprites, and sound tracks, I feel this helps narrow the scope for the developer and create something worth experiencing in a short time. The limitations also make it perfect for education as learners will not be overwhelmed by the array of options and settings at their disposable, as was the case when I first opened Unity.

I already have a meeting lined up with a potential school and am working on a short spiel I can give them. Wish me best of luck!

~sailboat642

Global Game Jam! I have been looking forward to this jam for a month.

So, how did it go?

The game we made was a failure. But you do not learn much from a success, which meant I learnt a lot. This was my first time working in an informal team, and everyone gave their best. In terms of getting a good playable build I could have done a lot more by starting on mechanics earlier. I guess I did not learn from my last jam and got carried away with art. I realise now that the general rule about working feature-wise also applies to teams. We also had a lot of new experiences, it was the first time my team was working with godot and, for a few them, git. Taking that into account our scope was too broad.

We had planned to make a character that can transform into the alien species using a mask (Masks was the theme). We wanted to incorporate narration and a lot of different characters for the environment. Our developer managed to make this happen, unfortunately we ran into problems while integrating the art animations. The rig did not work with the code used for the transformations also I realised there was a problem with the scale used, this shows a problem in communication. Another big problem we ran into was systems.

Some of us were using mac and some were using windows, which meant that the system files and configurations for godot were different. I guess the only solution to this is involving regular merges at the start of the production so we can include the neccesary folders and filetypes for our .gitignore file.

A simplified explanation for my less technical readers is:

Imagine each team member works in a different room with different sizes and placement of doors, and we constantly have to move furniture from one place to another. This means that everytime we move the furniture we have to place the furniture in different locations. Now this doesn't happen with the tool we were using and we have to step in and place everything where it belongs, which can get a bit annoying. We can however tell that tool to ignore certain stuff in the room so it makes the changes needed a bit easier to manage.

While there were a lot of problems with the game and development I still enjoyed my time at the jam and will definitely participate in this jam again. I want to thank IICT and underDOGS studio for facilitating this jam.

Here is a short demo of my contributions: Instagram Reel

By the way this was the first project with some real sound engineering, it really changed the game. Give this guy some love: Tanay.

~sailboat642

This week I am in Bombay. I had the pleasure of attending Lollapalooza, a music festival that features a variety of Indian artists as well as a few international hits like Kehlani and the headliner Linkin Park. The festival took place in Mahalaxmi Raceway, a horse racing track. The venue was huge and they managed to put 4 stages in it. At once there were at least 2 artists performing with no shortage of liquor and food. It was organised well. Although some artists, I felt, sounded much better off stage in clubs and bars. I had the chance to hear baalti at such a club and on the stage, and the stage performance did not do them justice. Linkin Park though was phenomanal, I had a great time!

The second reason I am in Bombay is to attend to Global Game Jam. They released the theme today and I went and watched the theme release stream. The theme includes, 'Masks', and optional diversification sub-themes. These diversifications are there to give the games some variety and include themes like, Cartridge Ready (games under 10MB), Many Hands Make Lightwork (games meant to be played by 4 or more players), Out Of Sight (games that can be played by both sighted and blind players), etc. There are also some diversification to promote the sponsors. Epic encourages developers to try UEFN, an engine I enjoyed working with in the past. Another sponsor, Games for Change (G4C), encourages developers to build socially impactful games, they can encourage environment preservation, road safety, or appreciate the hard work behind producing food resources.

~sailboat642

Last week I travelled to Jaipur to observe Makar Sakranti. The mid-winter harvest is popular in Jaipur and is one of the biggest celebrations. It marks the transition of the sun from the zodiac Saggitarius to Capricorn. People celebrate by flying kites in the day and lighting fireworks and lanterns at night. As a result most people spend the day hopping from one terrace to another.

I tried my hand at flying kites as well, although I had little success. It is a very instinct based skill, a bit like surfing. You need to flick the dor (the string attached to the kite) in quick succession so that the kite moves in the direction the nose is pointing to. By keeping a keen eye on kite you can move it as intended. While some people fly kites for leisure, there are certainly more competitive folk who compete by having the last kite in the sky. They do this by cutting the dor of the competition leaving the kite to submit to nature and fall down like a leaf. There are also mischievous cretins who cut kites purely for fun (it is a bit fun). One such person was bullying our neighborhood and preventing other kites from flying high, frustrating my cousin brother who was out there trying to teach me the skill.

Following Sakrant was the The Jaipur Litfest, name is pretty self explanatory. It is a cultural event celebrating authors and poets. Authors from all over the world come and talk about their books as well as subjects of interest. I only attended the first day where I sat through an interview of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. He was there to promote his book 'The Seven Rules of Trust', the talk was interesting and I ended up buying his book. I am halfway through and defenitely reccomend the read. The book is informative and easy to read. There are many anecdotes about Wikipedia and other historic events that make it easy to follow.

Next stop this week is Bombay. I am going to attend Lollapalooza as well as take part in the Global Game Jam.

~sailboat642

This blog came in a bit late so let me get you upto speed. This week I took part in 1 Bit Jam. The premise of the jam is that you only use 2 colors, on and off. I stuck to the basics; black and white. The theme that won the most votes this time was 'Into the Depths'.

Design​

This was a great theme which lead to some fun ideas. My idea was that you are a mosquito who gets eaten by a person, and now are trying to survive The Depths of Hunger. In this 2D platformer you get to explore the various parts of the digest system.

The main scene is the stomach, a vast canyon filled with acid. Here the player has to survive and explore the burning acid to find a way out. You will fill find fibres that you can use to strengthen your armour and shells which will upgrade your armour to last longer in acid.

Once your armour is strong enough, escape the stomach from the backdoor win the game.

The Jam​

I managed to put together a team with a sound designer and a game designer who helped me with collecting resources and finalising the design. I had a lot of fun with the art for this jam, the animations for the main character were a bit tedious, but I also drew a variety of assets for the game: two types of gates, diferrent spikes for hazards, floating platforms, title screen, game win animation and of course the tileset for the level.

As the Jam Deadline grew close, I realised I had spent quite a bit of time on Art and needed to focus on the platformer. I decided to make build for the game with less than a day from the deadline. I had managed to implement a basic platformer with a start and end scene. I ultimately submitted to the Jam.

I was a bit dissapointed that I had not completed all the features I would have liked include, especially since I drew the artwork for a lot of them. I did learn a useful lesson in time management and it has to do with the approach of my game developement.

For the last few jams I chunked up my workflow, I would draw the art for all the assets, implement it in code, and finally add audio. Which means that the last in line would always suffer, not for one feature but for many of them as many of them would fall short. But alas, I have learnt my lesson, I will collect resources and take action feature wise so everything that is included in the build will be as bad as the next.

There is still a lot work left in this game including the main feature. Water! so I do plan on working on it a bit more.

Upcoming​

At the end of this month, I will be participating in Global Game Jam! I am really excited as this will be my first in person jam. After spending a lot of game development solo or on the internet it this will be a welcome new experience.

~sailboat642