I started the year of twenty twenty four with a positive attitude and the mindset of working on my own little story-based turn-based top-down pixel art videogames. It is currently the eleventh eighteenth twenty-sixth twenty-seventh of november 31st of January, 2025! and no story-based turn-based top-down pixel art videogame has been finished.

I also told myself I would write twelve entries on this blog, but I have done only one. So I should speedrun things and do a videogame and eleven blog posts in 2 months, right? Lmao, no.

Well, this is awkward. Let’s hope something comes out of this in 2025.

The Rise and Fall of The Machinist Game Engine

There was a time in life where I had aspirations and goals, and I wanted to be a Video Game Programmer and work in the Video Game Industry – Being in suburban Brazil makes it a bit harder, mind you – I had finished a lot of small, silly, little games already, but when asking myself: “What is the next step?” or “How do I get Good? TM” I arrived at the conclusion that I have been avoiding for years at that point: I have to make my own game engine.

Many dead engines later I stumbled upon the dynamic duo of gueepo2D and The Machinist Game Engine. The first being a little game library to abstract graphics, input, window, and an application framework. And the second one being an actual game engine dedicated for tactics games.

The reason why I stubbornly insisted on working on The Machinist Game Engine is very simple, actually. To fulfill my lifelong goal of building my empire of Tactics Games, I have come to the conclusion that the best path would be to build a game engine tailored to make these types of games. I would have to code a bunch of those systems anyway if I were using Godot or Unity, might as well own the whole tech stack, right?

But I forgot to take in consideration a thing: What if I simply don’t want to code?

I mean, have you ever tried coding a renderer? a system to read and render fonts? an UI System?

Turns out coding is boring, no one cares about it, I don’t care about it, and the less I code the better. And this is just a very convoluted way of saying “maybe I should just use the Godot Game Engine.”

the machinist project, godot, you, and me

So I have downloaded and installed Godot and started remaking my game. Because that’s the path I’ve chosen apparently. And it’s actually a nice breath of fresh air to be able to work on a videogame without having to open Microsoft Visual Studio, not having to write C++ code, deal with CMake and compile times. Who would have thought !!

Above is the current state of “The Machinist Project” on Godot after a couple months of work. It’s not a lot but when I say “a couple months” it means that maybe I sat down to work on it four or five times in a given month, so I will take any progress !!

the royal army symphony, george (the orc musician) and things that really matter in game development

People think that what’s really important about game development is game design and coding. I’d say: “Nah, mate.” The real important thing is the music for your videogame.

Because apparently I have a really hard time not thinking about the music my video game should have. Not only that, this video game is very much story-driven and I can’t help myself but to add in-universe bands and musicians into the story. And if there are bands and musicians in the world, they have to have songs, albums and EPs, right? RIGHT?

So after writing a scene where the main character is in jail, I thought: “Hey, what if one of the guards was actually a musician, and they just play the guitar all day instead of working? That would be cool.” That would be cool. So that’s how George, The Orc Musician was born, he is a guard but also an aspiring musician, so I have to make a whole EP of songs that are just guitar and voice. I have to.

The “George, The Orc Musician EP” has to exist in-universe and has to be part of the soundtrack of this video game.

Anyway, here is a demo for the intro song of the EP. I wanted to try having a guitar and some form of 8-bit melody. Mixing up 8-bit sounds and “real” instruments is something that has been on the back of my mind for a while now, and I don’t hate it.

When they tell you about scope creep (or was it feature creep? idk) they don’t tell you it can come in the form of conceptualizing a number of bands, EPs, and a soundtrack in a range of different styles.

Take, for example, The Royal Army Symphony. The story is set in an Orc Kingdom, and it’s just common sense that every Monarch will have its own government subsidized official band. Don’t let the name “The Royal Army Symphony” fool you, it’s a Stoner Rock band. Anyway, here’s a demo piece by them.

I think it’s also hilarious that I spent time drawing this cover art. It’s just a poorly done trace over a picture of The 1975 but I made everyone green (because they are Orcs.)

Truly a multimedia project!