Monthly Mewsfeed – Aug 2025

Last Month

August was nice! No cat health panics, summer holiday with lots of birthdays to celebrate, and some good progress on top. Why can’t every month be like this?

✅️ Finish Scram

So far, Scram is the only game mode without any options or variations I could find or think of. If you have ideas or are missing something, let me know!

✅️ Implement Warfare

Warfare sounds like a lot of fun, but I am not 100% sure if my visualisation of the game’s state should be changed up. If you play it and have ideas or just thoughts on the current state, I’m interested to hear them!

✅️ Links to socials etc. from the app

There now is a small frame that I put into the main menu, linking to my socials and website. The plan is to extend this with new projects etc. as they become available.

➡️ Possibly update Godot version

I had hope that Godot 4.5 will come out fast enough for me to update before September, but I don’t think it has a release candidate yet. Luckily, all the updates I wanted to do for Count Dartula have been included in the latest upload and I’m busy with the Lonely Socks revival, so I’m not stressed. Maintenance updates will follow whenever it’s ready. I won’t include the update in September’s plan either, just in case it needs more time.

✅️ Next release

The release is live, without any problems with missing assets crashing the app on startup at all, and no quick follow-up repair, honestly 😅

Jokes aside, the current version has all features I wanted it to have, and all bugs I am aware of have been fixed, so I am happy with it!

✅️ Additional stuff

It’s a bit boring, but I decided to be an adult and migrate an old game, Lonely Socks, into my current framework instead of jumping into a shiny new project. This will include a visual overhaul and some improvements to the UI and tutorial, but the game mechanics itself won’t change. I made a nice start on it during the summer vacation already:

• Basic project setup
  Lonely Socks v2 is set up to export alongside Count Dartula. Once the game is implemented, it should be ready to be released to the Playstore pretty fast!
• UI theme overhaul
  The old UI seemed a bit drastic in its colour choices. I was aiming for a more relaxed feel and hope I’m on a better path this time around – feedback and opinions pending, of course!
• Asset overhaul
  Last time, I was going for high contrast between the socks and super bright colours, but I’m not convinced by that anymore. The new palette will be a bit more pastel (new territory for me), and most assets have already been adapted.
• Implementation
  Parts of the game’s logic have already been ported over, namely the merging of 2 matching socks including a rough draft of the animation and the score calculation.

Overall, looking at old code has been a strange experience. There are lots of things that looked overly complicated, or relied on solutions to problems that my game template has now solved without additional work. Some functions also went on and on and/or dealt with multiple things at once, not helping readability. It’s like reviewing yourself with new eyes and wondering what you were thinking 😅 I hope I do better this time, and notice an army of totally different problems when I re-read everything in a few years.

Next Month

There will be less sock-matching time because I’m back at work, but I hope I can get closer to the state the old version was in. There is a lot left to do, so I’ll focus on the logic and implementation first and just see how I get on.

➡️ Load/store game state

Loading an interrupted game is a pretty essential feature of V1. Since I changed the code around a little bit, I probably can’t copy and paste anything, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to extract what needs to be stored and write it into a file.

➡️ Implement pulling in new socks

Looking at the old code, I think the handling of animations with tweens has been revamped quite a bit. I remember it being more fiddly than the implementation I currently have for the matching animation, so I have a feeling it’s another heavily inspired re-implementation instead of a direct copy.

➡️ Implement high score tracking

High scores need to be kept per game mode and updated just like before. I have made a generic module for this that wasn’t used in the old game that I want to integrate now.

➡️ Set up all game modes

With all the matching and sock generating logic implemented, I hope it will be easy to configure separate levels for each game mode. This will not include tutorials yet, those might be more work because I want them to be specific to the game mode this time around. I don’t like V1’s “one size fits all” that much and hope I can think of something better.

➡️ Implement level unlocks

Instead of overwhelming a new player with the choice of game modes they don’t know, I want to make them unlocks this time. This could also encourage people to try more modes and give some sense of progression in a score attack game.