vercidium

Mid Year Update

Added 2024-06-21 07:18:47 +0000 UTC

I'm back after a break and want to share my goals for the YouTube channel, this Patreon page, free/paid source code, and the engine.

My ultimate goal is to make games and work on the engine full time, but that's a long way off. Right now my goal is to improve my communication and presentation skills, and creating YouTube videos is the ultimate challenge for that. I've published 6 videos now, and what I've learned so far is already being reflected in my work and personal life.

Selfishly, I'd love to get a Silver Play button from YouTube for reaching 100,000 subscribers. I've earned 73,061 subscribers over the past 8 months, so hopefully there's not long to go!

YouTube

Let's start with the videos I've been creating for YouTube. Each video takes over 100 hours to create, and this time consists of:

writing scripts
creating animations
revising scripts
brainstorming thumbnails and titles
revising scripts again
editing and applying feedback
constantly revising scripts

Personally, to stay invested in any project, I have to be working on something new. I loved working on the first few videos I posted to YouTube because everything was new: video editing, animations, 3D animations, voice recording, scriptwriting, all of it.

But the latest few videos were a chore to create because there wasn't much for me to learn. I've already created the C# animation library and figured out my a video-making process that works for me, so it's not exciting.

It should be the other way around - i.e. having a system should make video creation easier, but not for me!

So to keep things interesting, this next video won't have any 3D visualisations, and will instead focus on time travel. Networking concepts are difficult to convey because they involve bending and manipulating time, so I'm creating a small 2D game that will help clearly demonstrate these networking concepts.

My plan was to release a video on the 17th of every month - the same day we shut down Sector's Edge - but I've missed the past 2 months. So far I've spent about 20 hours on animations and 10 on the script.

Longer videos also seem to do better, so I'm spending more time diving into networking concepts - such as packet reliability, ping fluctuation, packet loss/delay - rather than brushing over them.

Here's the script for the networking video I'm working on, feel free to add some comments or leave feedback here. Each line has a coloured line beneath it, which describes the animation that will be playing while I'm saying that line. The colours mean:

Orange = footage/animation not recorded yet
Blue = recorded but not great
Green = finished animation

Patreon + Engine

There are three reasons I create YouTube videos:

Selfish: to improve my communication skills - both verbal and visual
Altruistic: to help game devs overcome challenges and understand concepts that I struggled with for a long time
Selfish: to make money

Patreon overlaps with the 2nd and 3rd reason. The goal is for people to start learning game dev from the YouTube videos, and then continue learning by experimenting with the source code they get access to on Patreon.

The issues I have with this approach are:

A lot of source code is dumped on you, so it's hard to find where the interesting code is. I need to write more documentation and create videos here that show how to use the engine
I'm not spending enough time refining the engine and adding new features
Licencing ambiguity

I also have an issue with the engine's UI system, which I'm using to create the animations for the YouTube videos. A lot of its code is quickly hacked together to create animations quickly - e.g. the animated SVG lines and the code snippets - so it's in desperate need of a clean up.

Licencing

I also need to choose how the paid engine code will be licenced. The goal of the engine isn't to replace Godot or Unreal, but instead to help game developers skip past the boring/challenging things that I got stuck on in the past.

But right now, if you want to use parts of the engine in your game, you can't as there's no license. Having no license prevents the source code from being shared publicly which is good for me, but means you can't use it in your games.

To get around this, I'm thinking each feature of the engine - e.g. particles, textures, multithreading - could be packaged up and imported it into your C# games. You could then use these packages for as long as you're subscribed to Patreon/GitHub Sponsors.

This means I could create paid obfuscated packages for the things that I'm not keen on sharing the source code for, e.g. raytraced audio.

This could work, but I also think there could be a better solution. Let me know your thoughts!

Free Stuff

Everyone loves free stuff, so I'd like to go back and update the code for my old articles on https://vercidium.com/blog. So far I've updated the code in the voxel meshing articles - with the Greedy Meshing repository - but I'd also like to update the particle, raymarching and lag compensation repositories too.