Project Development Journal Week 1

Actually, we have to start a few days earlier.

Woops.

If I knew Javascript or better CSS, I would have done that dynamically. Lets just pretend I did, okay?

For the past few days on Twitter and Youtube, I'd been getting recommended Crashune Academy's tutorials on low-poly characters. I'd been sharing them in a few places, trying to get people to look into them -- friend of the show Gabriella "Contrastellar" Agathon has decreed this the year of making shit.

It seemed like a really intuitive way to, well, make shit.

Which meant I had to follow my own advice.

Fuck.

I didn't take any screenshots of the low poly character model, but the process of making it through the tutorial showed me that Blender wasn't as scary as my brain had been making it out to be.

So I made two more things.

Oh, wait. Don't forget the dumpyhound.

I feel like I did more on Sunday than it seems I actually did.

Woops? I did, however, remake the Foxhound again. This one's the Blockhound.

For an easy victory today, I'd started working on something far stupider in Blender.

A few years back, I'd experimented a bit with understanding the limits of what height maps could be used for. Back then, I was reading guides on how to use them for terrain displacement based off of some tools that City Skylines players had been using.

However, the entire time I'd been using them back then, I had a small confusion on how they could be used as solid meshes, as I had originally heard about them in the context of using them for terrain within video games. My understanding at the time had been that if they had no collision mesh, you'd just have really pretty terrain.

As it turns out, Blender's displacement map feature can just distort a mesh. You may want to subdivide it a few times, but that's a smaller issue than I thought.

After I was done messing with that, I went back to the Low Poly Character Tutorial a bit more. I've not yet finished it, admittedly, because I'm unsure if this is the process I want to stick with for now -- but the tutorial was really good.

Then I just also made a Spas-12. Cause why not.

Afterwards, I remade the Foxhound. Again. Enter the Duckhound and Conehound.

I was starting to get a bit tired with just Blender, though. I yearned for more.

So I installed Godot.

Well, I already had Godot installed. I'd poked at some premade assets a bit in it. Now I was trying to actually learn it.

This may have been a mistake.

Yet, by the end of the day, I'd wound up in a pretty happy spot with the little that I'd created then. I'd mostly followed tutorials for it, but hey. Snow.

We start with the Pit.

Please be nice to the Pit.

Wednesday marked my descent into true madness, I think.

See, I lied a little bit it seems.

I did not just start to explore Heightmaps on Monday.

I started to investigate LIDAR scans too. The heightmap didn't have the resolution I was looking for -- I'm wanting to make games set on the ground, where you walk, and the heightmap seemed just a bit too... unpolished.

As it turns out, LIDAR scans to half a meter of accuracy are rather freely available. Thanks, USGS.

However, I am not always the smartest woman. So I accidentally made several three gigabyte models of the terrain I acquired scans of and then tried to shove it into Godot.

As, y'know, just one whole mesh.

One insanely, insanely large mesh.

Remember: the orange you see there are the selected parts of a wireframe.

That is, as the kids say, a very dense mesh. It's also 10 kilometers.

So, I made it a bit smaller in filesize at the cost of quality. The resulting mesh was now only 500MB, and Godot was slightly happier about loading it.

Then I stole an aurora shader (a few of them, really) and shoved it above the mesh.

Then I realized I fucked up the aurora shader. So I fixed it.

I apparently also had added the flashlight at this point already. It's just a spotlight attached to the head camera that I then fiddled with a projected gradient.

The gradient's just there to to get that effect of the way you can adjust a flashlight's focus or whatever.

It wound up okay I'd say. Pain to figure out. Again, not the smartest gal.

To wrap up the day, I made my car. Well, what was my car before I moved to the Netherlands.

I could probably do better.

First, I made sure to do my Little Ladies' Day in FFXIV before I forgot. One great advantage of EU timezones means even though I forgot till the last day, I still had time.

Afterwards, I probably faffed around in Godot a bit. I don't have any screenshots, so my memory is a bit foggy from everything I've been doing.

Then I reinstalled Tarkov. I felt the urge to properly play it. I resisted and just used it for references of guns I liked instead.

Did you know that Escape from Tarkov is the only video game to have the USP Elite in it? Even the USP Expert, an equally oddball USP variant, was in more games than that. By one, admittedly, but still! To say nothing about how popular the base and tactical variants are.

You may guess based off of this rant that the USP Elite was the first gun I modelled today. Wrong. It was an AK first.

I even then put it in Godot!

Then I made another USP Elite.

And the normals were horrifically fucked and I couldn't fix them before I went to bed, so I just told myself I'll remake it in the morning.

True to my word, I remade the USP Elite. Then I put it in Godot.

I gave the capsule I'd been using in a project a dumpy.

I set up a bunch of bullshit that I'm sure I'll use later.

Then I watched a movie; afterwards, I tried to get Red Orchestra 2 style aiming set up.

I don't have any gifs or footage from Friday of the process, but it was a fucking struggle.

Genuinely, I think it's only because of the developer of Dragonfly that I didn't lose my sanity and give up here. They were a great help in the process.

I did a lot today, it seems. I can sum it up best with some Bluesky embeds.

why are they letting me learn godot

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— artemis "frckld" elizabeth (@frckld.gay) March 14, 2026 at 8:27 PM

seriously turned to soup trying to do this shit

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— artemis "frckld" elizabeth (@frckld.gay) March 14, 2026 at 8:28 PM

i’m so chad

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— artemis "frckld" elizabeth (@frckld.gay) March 15, 2026 at 1:14 AM

That was Saturday. My open-backed headphones annoyed my partner as I worked on the geiger counter. Good use of time.

And that brings us to today. I spent two hours writing this up instead of anything more productive.

Does this count as unproductive? I don't know. I hope it was useful to some extent, at least, with figuring out that a lot of this shit isn't as scary as it seems.

Younger me could've definitely used someone guiding me through this like this, at least.