Monthly Mewsfeed – Feb 2024

Hello everyone!

Mood Meter

🤧️ Felix: Snotty
😺️ Sneaky: Good Girl Mode! Always hoping for a crisp to drop.
🎮️ Maryla: Addicted to stacking shapez ⚪️⬜️

🎯️ Count Dartula: Released! But stop gaming and complete me!!!
💖️ Website: Do I look pretty yet?

3️⃣️ New Project Ideas:

• #ifdef’s for gdscript
  • Very silly. Probably nothing I will ever spend time on. But WOULDN’T IT BE COOL if gdscript had something like C++’s preprocessor magic? No? Just straight-up go and use C++ like a normal person? Fine 😐️
• calculator app with editable history
  • Might be something that happens! Imagine a calculator where your old input isn’t destroyed, but can be scrolled through for reference, or modified, or pinned, …
  • Added bonus: another non-game app and no assets needed 🙂
• Meowerlord picture page
  • See below! This is happening because cats are great.

Top 5 To Dos

Last Month

Immediate great start for the Mewsfeeds – this was supposed to be released on the 1st, but who keeps track of dates when addicted to a game? Not me! So, apart from that, how did it go?

✅️ Create first version of Dart app
✅️ Sort out google dev account

Count Dartula is released on Android, and thus, I hope my account should count as “active” again. At least there have been no further warnings for now. The app has some more functions than I hoped for already (multiplayer and mostly functional UI), but a few issues remain, and then there are all the other fun game modes to implement! May the play testing begin.

✅️ Un-Fugly this website!
➡️ Update the Meowerlord logo

The website has been updated with a new colour theme and some changes to the layout and structure, but I haven’t implemented all the ideas I had yet. Continuous updates will follow anyway, but I still intend to look more closely at the old Meowerlord logo, so this task has been taken over to next month.

❌️ Port/update old game code for Godot 4

Not ❌️ as in “cancelled forever”, but ❌️ as in “more important things to do right now”. I will come back to this when Count Dartula is finished and I am happy enough with the website!

Overall, this is 3/5 ✅️ for February – not amazing, but OK as a start.

Next Month

➡️ Update the Meowerlord logo

I had ideas to rework the logo a lot, but at the end of the day I know and like the old logo as it is. I would like to try out a few changes to the little cat and the font, but I won’t be mad if the changes end up being minor or don’t work.

➡️ Meowerlord pictures

This is a little website sub-project that I want to finish soon! We have 2 silly Meowerlords and should share the laughs. Everyone loves cat pictures, and we have collected a few brilliant ones over 10 years now.

➡️ Count Dartula UI improvements

Namely:

• Improve the display of “busted” rounds – resetting all labels to 0 could be confusing in the moment
• Store scores after quitting the app – the game should recover it’s state when/however it gets interrupted
• Starting player selection before beginning a game
• Finishing score suggestions for the last round(s), because math is easier for machines

Other little details may follow as well! So far, I have not tested the app in a real life dart game. Who knows what else annoys us?

➡️ Count Dartula: more game modes

The first one I have in mind is “Around the World”, and maybe adding some customisation options to the game modes (x01 instead of 501, or counting only singles/doubles/triples for “Around the World”). There are loads of rulesets out there that I would like to add – Shanghai Darts for example sounded very fun to me, maybe that will be next on the list. Getting all the game modes in will likely take longer than a month, but I will be happy if “Around the World” is available soon.

➡️ Get Ads running again

Count Dartula will be the guinea pig for Admob as well, which is only a question of re-activating an account. Test ads are already working and currently not exported with the release, but I hope that I can activate a little banner at the top soon.

Other than that, I need to stop using my good progress on Dartula as an excuse to play shapez all night. But I also need to build my “create everything” machine because I just unlocked logic and automation 🤓️

Have a lovely March, and enjoy Easter if you celebrate it!