waiting for Godot

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. 🙂

recent progress:

• more abstract algebra review for nefarious game design purposes, this time via Thomas W. Judson’s Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications (open source textbook; I have it in PDF)
• animation: additional storyboarding
• music: working on syncing the acoustic piano recording with the MIDI version in my DAW for nefarious sound design purposes
• exploring Godot + Dialogic and Ren’Py as possibilities, and playing more with Ink; remember, I’d rather do the R&D up-front!

I may concede defeat and move to Ren’Py with Python, not least because Ren’Py is comparatively simple, specialized for VNs, and for the minigame/tactics component, my husband codes Python for his job so I have in-house tech support, poor guy. :3 I want to figure out whether integration of WWISE into Ren’Py via Python and WAAPI is straightforward-ish, or failing that, whether I can use FMOD with Ren’Py. Ren’Py does have some built-in audio handling and I’m sure either WWISE or FMOD is wild overkill, but I’d like to find out!

For even more wild overkill, I’m contemplating implementing a real-time audio transport effect in C++ into Python via ctypes (see also: Python bindings overview) (see also: T. Henderson and J. Solomon, “Audio Transport: A Generalized Portamento via Optimal Transport” [arxiv.org]), mostly as proof of concept. I have books on coding audio effects VSTs in C++! I’d love to give it a whirl! For troll mode, I am dying to play with Csound again!

Game music composition and audio implementation seems to have wildly bifurcated perspectives for, probably, historical reasons:

• Western music notation/theory
• the coders/devs :3
• digital music production in a DAW [digital audio workstation] (whether involving recordings of live instruments, MIDI + VSTs, or similar)
• mixing/mastering and audio engineering
• DSP (digital signal processing)

I’m legit mad at myself for not investigating DSP earlier! “Sheet music” composition is very familiar to me, but doesn’t (currently) integrate well with digital music production. I’m not a dev as such, and both DAWs and audio engineering have wild amounts of jargon. DSP comes (more) from math (it looks like a lot of Claude Shannon and Fourier analysis/transforms from casual inspection?), and math also has wild amounts of jargon…but my B.A. is in math so math jargon tends to look homey, familiar, and learnable as opposed to “what do you mean, ‘loudness,’ ‘gain,’ ‘levels,’ and ‘volume’ kind of all mean the same thing except they don’t really?!”

Meanwhile, Godot is fun and I may continue playing with it. I’ve seen some delicious Balatro and Slay the Spire quasi-clone implementation tutorials that look fun!

…apparently I’m That Pedant who observes that technically the health of the robot would increase if you used -= or health = health – amount if you passed a negative value for amount. Once a math B.A., always a math B.A.? (Type checking and typing variables haven’t yet been introduced other than a brief note that it can be done—observation, not complaint—and in Godot it appears to be optional. The coding languages I’ve used recently require type declaration, so it’s been a while!)

More seriously, the tutorial series Learn GDScript from Zero is delightful, and not just because I have turtle graphics nostalgia. I decided to start from the very beginning, which is pitched toward people with legit zero coding experience. Pedagogically, this is beautifully constructed, with clear explanations of concepts that won’t be obvious to newcomers, regular quizzes you can self-test with, and small coding exercises run through some kind of web-based built-in interpreter, which also checks for correctness. I was chuffed that they thought to explain radians! (I don’t need the explanation, but a lot of people never use radians!) I think you could point a ten-year-old at this and they would be able to have fun with it.

If you’re wondering why I was messing around with Godot that day, I woke with a migraine and had a doctor’s appointment that day (and another this week), so I’m on loafing self-entertainment mode. :]

Meanwhile, coding has driven me to drink: Irish Breakfast tea with white chocolate syrup. 🙂

Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL