Hey everyone! First of all, no, the Awesome Soccer update is not out yet, sorry for the clickbait. But progress is (slowly but surely) getting done!

As I said previously I’m pretty busy with my last year of bachilerato before going to university. Thus most of the time I prefer to chill out by playing videogames rather than making them. But every now and then I have time and inspiration to work on cool stuff (statistically speaking there has to be at least 1 person who finds our stuff to be cool). I’ve wanted to post an update here for a few weeks now, and since I’m currently quarantined due to the C word, I finally found some time to do it.

Awesome Soccer Progress

The combat update is going quite well! This December I spent as much time as I could working on the basic code for combat. I planned to release a beta of it back then, but a case of flu slowed me down and I quickly realized the amount of work needed is a bit higher than I expected. Here’s a screenshot of a random fight:

The most tactical combat system since Epic Encounters 2! (not really)

Since then I’ve been slowly working on adding content (enemies, weapons, artifacts, etc) which every now and then requires me to go back and expand the combat systems so the content can work (for example I somehow completely forgot about implementing stuns until I started working on a move that needed them). So far, there are 3 weapons, 2 soccer moves, 4 artifacts and 1 whole area with a boss implemented. That may make you think progress is going very slowly, but that’s because Awesome Soccer is not the only thing I’ve been working on for these past 3 months - in reality, adding content to Awesome Soccer is getting very fast & easy. The other day I added the 4th artifact in just 15 minutes thanks to how stuff is stored and handled.

Some of the cool new toys in Awesome Soccer. Seek synergies between weapons & artifacts to achieve ultimate power.

The plan is to release it this year. Most likely it will happen in summer, after my university access exams. I will do a friends & family™ beta once most of the content is implemented and progression is finalised, and after bugfixes, feedback, and implementing the final boss, I will call Awesome Soccer finished.

After so many rewrites I really wanna move away from Awesome Soccer and do other stuff. I’m not tired of it, I just don’t want to work on it for my whole life. I must say that I am STILL not happy with it (the code for it, I mean) but I really want to have 1 project here that I can call finished.

Every 3 months or so I look back at what I’ve done and instantly want to completely rewrite stuff with the new things I keep learning. Thankfully Awesome Soccer’s code is not that bad; I wish I had used some framework for it instead of pure javascript (we didn’t originally plan to have combat in this version, which is why I didn’t bother), but since it’s a pretty non-graphical game, I think it’s gonna be fine.

RoR2 Modding

wFridge and I picked up Risk of Rain 2 this January and oh boy, that game is so fun. So fun that I made some mods for it! They’re nothing special, mostly just QoL things we felt the game needed, like:

• Moving Artifcer’s Ion Surge to the utility skill slot
• Making the bot character’s utility ability last forever until cancelled (VROOOM)
• Making bosses not aggro turrets that are all the way on the other side of the map (we’re still not 100% sure if this mod works, but)

The Beetle Guards mod spices up your Beatle Guard army.

And some others. I haven’t had the time to them upload to the Thunderstore (the game’s unofficial modding repository), but after the update on March 31st I’ll consider doing so.

The main reason I brought this up is because I learned A LOT from browsing the game’s code: state machines, IL code, and what the heck enums are useful for. I really enjoyed slowly but surely finding out how to do the things I wanted, and it felt great to use a statically-typed language again after spending so much time with JS in the last autumn. And it got me pretty excited to work with Unity again, which brings us to the next section of this post:

ZRPG’s Future

“The Siege of Kaerwood” (codenamed ZRPG) was my first Unity game that I made in spring last year. I worked on it quite a bit until late summer when I switched to developing the new web version of Awesome Soccer. It was actually pretty fun to play, and was meant to be the first game to feature the world & characters we’ve had in our mind for a few years.

As I said in the last section, I learned a whole lot about Unity and C# from dissecting Risk of Rain 2’s code and I’m pretty pumped to develop more in Unity. But it’s highly unlikely I will go back to ZRPG - at least, not by dusting off the current version of it. The code for it is so bad that I’m 100% convinced it would be wiser, faster and better in the long-term to restart it from scratch.

But I also do not want to get into the same situation as with Awesome Soccer, where I end up rewriting the same game for 2 years. I don’t think abandoning projects is bad - and I don’t think most devs think that either - it’s good to explore all kinds of projects to find the one you will truly feel satisfied to work on.

Thus if I ever return to ZRPG, I’m would not be a simple remake; I’m sure the gameplay would be expanded significantly, taking influence from all the cool games I’ve played since then.

Some more stuff before wrapping up this post

This year I found out just how much fun small projects are. It’s great to sit down for an evening or 2 and write simple scripts for problems nobody else in the world might have. Like archiving a Youtube playlist of 900+ videos into a spreadsheet, which is what I did back in February.

My music playlist, which I started in summer of 2016, has quite a lot of videos. Many of them have since then been made private or deleted, which saddens me as going through this playlist is like walking down the memory lane. Music brings me very powerful nostalgia. Nearly every song in that playlist brings me back to the time I used to listen to it and reminds me of what I was doing and how my life was back then.

Videos being deleted from it started becoming a problem, so I had to figure out a way to take “snapshots” of the playlist every now and then. With so many videos in the playlist, doing it manually was not an option, so I finally sat down in February and wrote a Python 3 script for it.

The script puts all the videos of a playlist into a spreadsheet, with the video name, uploader, date, description, and a link to the Nico Nico Douga upload. A lot of the music in that playlist is reuploaded from Nico Nico, so I made the script look for NND video IDs (sm prefix + 8 digits) in the descriptions and put them in the spreadsheet, since NND videos rarely ever go down.

Here’s the script if someone wants to use it. The code is a bit janky but it works. You’ll need to provide your own Google API key. Or you can just ask me on Discord to run the script for you on any playlist.

Speaking of spreadsheets, check out this one I made for Animal Crossing: New Horizons which lists all bugs and fish, and highlights the ones you can currently catch: link

That’s all I wanted to share. Thank you to everyone from the future who will read this once I actually start sharing my website with other people. I hope that someday I’ll make something people will remember me for. Not something super-popular, just something obscure that only a few people would enjoy. It’s always fun to be part of something small but unique that only a small group of people know about.

(Fun fact, this was supposed to be posted on the 17th. Blame the new Animal Crossing)