Monthly Mewsfeed – Oct 2025

Last Month

Even though the To Dos got done and I felt like I made decent progress overall, October was actually a pretty bad month. An animation issue in Lonely Socks sent me into a complete tangent of over-engineering, which I’m still in the middle of. The release feels even further away than last month, in a way.

Then there are the Meowerlords. We have another health issue on our hands – Sneaky and her leg 😣️ The bald spot has developed into an open wound that needs daily care and seems to ignore all antibiotics she is given. She has been wearing a cone of shame for her own protection and at least doesn’t seem to be in pain, but we are suffering with her 😅️

That being said, here is what happened in October:

✅️ Finish the autosaver module

The new module works and has been integrated into Lonely Socks and Count Dartula. Cool!

✅️ Update to Godot 4.5

This is done and went alright. There was some odd behaviour with Android manifests suddenly bitching about a value they no longer recognised, so I deleted it. I can’t figure out when or why it went, but everything seems to work. When do I ever complain about being able to do something in less code or with less data?

✅️ Update Count Dartula

Maintenance update is done! I think it also included a fix for certain textures not being exported for the Cricket (USA) game mode, so it’s not all internal data handling.

✅️ Update Lonely Socks

The socks are now saved using the shiny new autosaver module. I’m glad I now have this neat thing 🙂

✅️ Fine-tune Lonely Socks visuals

Now, this is where the wheels fell off. I did a lot of minor things with animation times, new assets, better heart explosion effects, and finally got the icon into a state I like well enough. Somewhere in that process, my animation for pulling in new socks broke. I hunted this bug for so long that I got angry and decided to try to solve this once instead of having to stare at it again in another game. Is this what I get for making a conscious decision to not over-engineer a generic solution for a specific issue? Maybe.

✅️ Additional stuff

The only thing worth talking about is my new MatchGraph module (name is subject to change). I love matching games and have some more planned, so I don’t think the effort will be wasted. But it’s also a lot to do and think of, and replacing the current Lonely Socks implementation with this module also sounds like work.

Next Month

Many future tasks have the potential to go wrong or take longer than I hope, and then there are the cats on top. Please read the list below as the best guess of a dev who still can’t estimate how long things take and may or may not have time to execute them 😅️

➡️ General-purpose MatchGraph

Games based on a graph of matchable nodes have some common and infuriating problems. Why do all my socks decide to show up in the top left corner of the screen when they should be laid out in a neat grid? How do I know if a sock is busy displaying some match animation and can’t also try to move up a row? Why does a node jump around, flicker, or do other weird visual things? That is where the MatchGraph should help, while being flexible enough to support a grid of socks as well as a tree-shaped graph, a line with loads of data in the nodes, and all the other ideas I had. I also want it to be testable automatically as well as manually. Seeing an animation play out can really help understanding issues or deciding whether the animation itself is any good.

➡️ Code cleanup with new features

I discovered some features in Godot that could help make scripts more readable, namely a tooltip for your own custom functions etc., and foldable code regions. This will be the perfect task for those moments where less brain power is available, and I’ll thank myself later for mouse-over documentation.

➡️ Update Lonely Socks to MatchGraph

This one is hard to plan. Things could go so right, or so wrong, and I’ll only know once I tried. Either way, it will show me if I did a reasonable job with the MatchGraph before.

➡️ New Playstore assets

One of my favourite things to do – images for my apps. Will totally not be put off as long as possible. I still need some good screenshots of the finished game and the header image.

➡️ Release?!

It’s scary to list this, but… here we go! If all goes well, it could work!

I say it every time, but it’s especially true this month: “We’ll see how it goes!” And all fingers crossed for the geriatric cats and their nurses, please 🥲️ If the plan blows up in my face, I’ll try to make up for it during December!