FIREBRAND'S RADICAL ART AND GAMES

Project Development Journal Week 6

Tools Used

• Blender
• Godot
• Adobe Dreamweaver
• Audacity

Resources Abused

• Godotshaders
• My beloved friends

Weekly Recap

I took it probably slower than I should've to keep up a good mental pace for a lot of this week, but I'm not upset about it I think.

A slower week helped me a lot mentally. I modelled a lot, and it was really relaxing -- a terrifying thought, given how much I struggled with Blender at the start.

I did post about them too!

they locked me in a cave till i finished these

[image or embed]

— artemis "frckld" elizabeth (@frckld.gay) April 16, 2026 at 12:43 PM

I'm quite proud with them. Mostly with the AR-57 more than the UMPs, surprisingly.

There was a lot I was working on, though. I think my ADHD caught up with me bad this week, and it put me in analysis paralysis hell to some extent. Getting out of it was a bit of a struggle.

Two things then happened. Firstly, Ludum Dare 59 started, and I woke up 12 hours late and still wanted to do the Compo.

Friend of the show Minkle "The Minkler" Minkle (no social media provided) then also dared me to attempt it, saying it would let me learn some vital skills for development.

Bastard that they are, they were right somewhat. Lets go over it.

Firstly, what did I not like about the Ludum Dare? 

The Disliked
• What is considered "base code" seems very unclear, especially for a novice like me.
• In the past, it seems Ludum Dare allowed AI generated content. It's unclear if that's still currently the case, and what is considered generated content vs derivative content confused me too.
• Also, at least in a Godot context, what would Libraries be versus premade assets and plugins?
• Why is it that rotating an object within the game on its Z-axis does not also rotate its local X-Axis? Am I the stupid one?

This is just the grievances I generated. They're not intended to be marks against Ludum Dare. I'm just dumb and need my hand held. The last one isn't even about Ludum Dare, it's about me struggling with transforms in Godot.

So, then, what did I learn?

What Liz Thinks She Learned
• I still have some amount of freeze response when under large amounts of stress.
• Reimplementing my statemachine as a more proper statemachine is simpler than I think it would be and I should just do it.
• Honestly there's a lot of things I probably should reimplement to be better separated and have less codependencies within my current project.
• A springarm-based interaction system is really quite shrimple.
• Somehow, making a plane rotate like a plane is more annoying in Godot than it was in Unreal Blueprints.
• I'm able to easily create a MiG-25 now in Blender versus when I started and barely could.
• Making a camera lag behind a rotating target for gamefeel reasons is relatively simple too.

Beyond all of that, I spent some time engaging with other Game Dev People(TM) on various Hellsites. It genuinely blows my mind how much they're capable of doing. I need to squeeze their brains more. In a similar vein, I rejoined a Discord server I was on a self-imposed exile from that was full of a bunch of my (millenial voice) fellow creatives and friends (end millenial voice) and the response I've been getting there has been genuinely a massive improvement to my mood.

So, thanks for that, if you're reading this.

While I was doing my usual whining, Friend of the show Minkle "The Minkler" Minkle pointed out that a lot of devs -- even the ones with more frequent devlogs -- tend to only show the areas they did good at, not where the struggles were. I hope that, for whatever it's worth, seeing someone like me -- no background in gamedev or programming of relevance, really -- still able to do (arguably) so much in so little time and knowing that I'm strugglign to does still do some amount of good for you.

You don't need to create at a level like Brandon Sanderson or Monty Oum. You just gotta try. If little old me can, I bet you can too.

See you next week.