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🐱Hey Farbs, whatcha making? 🧔Hi! I'm making this! 😼But Farbs, that's the incredible neon laserfish shmup Death Ray Manta SE. Rob made that already. 🧔That's true, and it's very cheap so I sure hope everyone has already bought a copy. Also, I'm making it again. 😾No! Bad Farbs! I want new games!

🧔I'm making new games. Also, at night, I'm doing this. 🙀Wow! Can you explain why? And can you maintain this conversation shtick? I can do one of those things. Sometimes I like to rebuild other people's games. For me it's a bit like doing a master study, and it's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.

Previously I've rebuilt chunks of the first Zelda game in various forms of 3D, I've made Pong a whole bunch of times, and I recently had a go at pacman. Oh and of course ROM CHECK FAIL was made from chunks of about a dozen games. Building these helps me pay attention and learn what they're doing.

Also snapping the pieces into place is satisfying, and it's relaxing to build stuff without designing it first. Anyhow, that's what I'm doing with DRM. It's not for release, but it's interesting and fun, and if I remember I'll add to this thread as it comes together! Meanwhile: Another 3D Zelda.

The tech underpinning this port is the wonderful #RayLib, on top of which I've jammed a custom lua integration and everything I need to run a Meandering Thread of Execution. I love the Meandering Thread model, and if you're curious you can learn about it here: mastodon.social/@Farbs/11267...

Are you back? Welcome back. The other thing I'm using, as very detailed reference, is the Death Ray Manta SE source. Rob supplied the whole Game Maker Studio project file in the install folder, which is a wonderful thing to do. My tech takes a simpler approach and only ever runs from source :)

So anyway, source! Rob provided it, but it's from a slightly older version and I'm picky so instead I've found a ridiculously comprehensive GameMaker decompiler - delightfully titled UndertaleModTool - and I'm using that to snoop the current Steam build instead.

Today's progress is this! I added the big chunk of text at the bottom, which updates every few seconds to show the next paragraph. The blurry effect around the edges is the result of drawing multiple layers with different rotations, which was a bit of a pain 'cos RayLib doesn't do text rotation.

I solved it by moving and rotating the camera for each one, but that means every layer of every line of text is a unique batch, which is a bit poo. Oh well. Runs fast enough. Hooray for modern (ten year old) hardware. Now on to the game itself! Except... what's that? Oh. Oh no.