John Dunham (He/Him )
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jfdunham.bsky.social
John Dunham (He/Him )
@jfdunham.bsky.social
Ph.D., Podcaster, Quintessential Nerd.

A facade worn by Gorgo (the wise).

He/Him

Views not his own, but those of an ancient eldritch abomination
So I got my bulletml engine running ~4k projectiles with active tasks (e.g., changeDirection, changeSpeed, and accel). 4k is roughly the upper bound, though, because once you hit 4.5k it churns pretty badly (due to physics). Also, 100% GDScript.

#gamedev #solodev #indiedev #bullethell #godot
August 12, 2025 at 9:03 PM
So I got the bulletml markup format working in #godot. It's mostly feature complete, but I have a few edge cases I'm still debugging. I plan to release the importer, at least as a plugin, at some point, with the physics server-based projectile manager bundled.

#gamedev #solodeve #bullethell
August 8, 2025 at 8:46 PM
Haven't posted updates in a while, but it's surprising how many projectiles you can slap into #godot with some special behavior. Last run is 2k!

#indiedev #gamedev
July 26, 2025 at 12:18 AM
While the animations may need some tlc, the monopod is now fully test-ready and has a better jump algorithm. It sometimes misjudges and falls in spikes, but I think it's hilarious, so it stays in.

#solodev #gamedve #godot #metroidvania
June 17, 2025 at 6:01 PM
Integration testing with gdunit4, as I have a large number of states used by multiple actors.

#gamedev #solodev #godot
June 14, 2025 at 4:23 AM
So if you follow me, you'll know that I have a terrible habit of working on tools instead of gameplay. But here's a cool visual.

Basically, I was tired of programming animation sequences by hand/consts, so I wrote something that extends my animation selector for cycles.

#gamedev #indiedev #solodev
May 17, 2025 at 12:08 AM
I added a new attack animation for the fang worm enemy to help deal with some of the weirdness of how the chase looked.

I added a tunable wind-up, too, to help make the attack readable/fair.

#gamedev #metroidvania #indiedev #solodev
May 14, 2025 at 4:24 AM
Visualization is a pain. Here's my attempt to make things a little better for visualizing my state machines:

#indiedev #gamedev #solodev #toolsdev
May 5, 2025 at 11:59 PM
The latest tool development diversion is visualizing my state machine transitions and making the transitions as close to fully data-driven as possible. The end goal is to make states more drag-and-drop.

#gamedev #tooldev #indiedev #solodev
May 2, 2025 at 8:40 PM
That feeling when you spend two weeks implementing a fully featured behavior tree plugin for your game and decide it's not really worth using because it's messier than the code.

#gamedev #indiedev #whoops
April 29, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Less exciting update, but I've been working on iterating on visuals for the different areas in my game. I generally draw them per tile in Aseprite and then pull it into LDtk to see how it looks on an experimental map.

#gamedev #indiegamedev #solodev #godot.
April 11, 2025 at 6:43 PM
I'm playing with some visual effects right now, and I may have made the accidental raddest-looking effect I've ever made. It exists because even though I take some liberties with the GameBoy aesthetic, I have some hard and fast rules that I stick to.

#indiegamedev #godot #gamedev
April 3, 2025 at 8:16 PM
Here's my little chase dude I call the Fang Worm (very original, I know). I'll probably add a turning animation in the future, but that requires an adjustment to my pipeline, and I don't know how much of a value it will add.

#gamedev #indiedev
March 21, 2025 at 11:34 PM
Work continues on the EyeDrop. It's not particularly bright, but that's mostly by design. I decided to make it chase the player without actual pathfinding and rely on a search mechanic to adjust to the surroundings.

#gamedev #indiedev
March 20, 2025 at 9:34 PM
I've been working on the EyeDrop pretty seriously lately. It's a bit of a strange enemy, but I'm trying to make it very expressive. Here's the animation test for the attacks in the primary eight directions; I think I've got the arcs looking good/the feel down.

#gamedev #indiedev
March 20, 2025 at 2:04 AM
New animations for the eye drop monster, but it still needs an attack animation.

#gamedev #indiedev
March 19, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Here's a video showing the current state of the game, including some new mechanics and the new sound manager I've been working on. I'd post a link to a demo, but that demo I have is actually appreciably worse than this version and it's only 2 weeks old.

#gamedev #indiedev #godot
March 12, 2025 at 6:22 PM
First post (I think)! This is a demo of a piece of pipeline code I wrote for my game to export SFX made in Hammer-FX to the .wav file format. It uses PyAudio and PyBoy to extract the audio and run the ROM, respectively.

#gamedev #indiedev
March 11, 2025 at 2:18 PM