Barking Up The Wrong Resource Tree

I’ve recently started on a new project - it feels good to say that - called “Pupper”. The idea is to make a parody/commentary of twitter and social media. You’ll notice that I refer to that site as twitter, rather than the mono-letter alternative, for various reasons that I won’t go into here.

I’m using Godot - not just because I want to (I do), but also because it’s the only game engine that will reasonably run on a Raspberry Pi - I’m currently using an RPI v5 8gb as my desktop, simply because it was the cheapest option, even with all of the bells and whistles. I really hope this can hold out for a year or so, so I’m totally out of debt with some savings once I need to replace it.

Regarding Godot - if you run it with the renderer in compatability mode, then it works just fine. I’ve recently gained access to a community driven godot port for the Nintendo Switch as well, so while I’ll need Windows for Nintendo’s SDK, I’ll at least be able to experiment with that eventually.

Pupper, The Social Media Platform for Bitches

I can get away with saying “bitch” if it’s referring to a female dog, right?

I’m thinking that writing the text using this kind of “attitude” would be an interesting approach - unfortunately, I think the name of the attitude is “catty”. I still have a lot of work to do regarding the actual written text, but for now I’m beginning with the basics of the program.

I’ve been digging around Godot’s features, and I feel like the custom resources are useful - a “Bark” is analogous to a tweet, so I created a resource type for barks, borrowed a few famous tweets as placeholders, and developed both the storage and basic display for them. The nine-slice background is actually just a sprite plucked from Kenney’s Game Assets All-In-1, which I apparently owned already. If you’ve never seen kenney.nl before, go give him a follow.

Before I focus on making things pretty, I want to try and get more of the feed structure working i.e. new barks can be added as old ones fall off, responding to a bark in a certain way will trigger certain responses, and a timeline system tied to an event system could be interesting - i.e. if certain conditions are met, then XYZ will occur over the next 10 minutes, for example.

I don’t have the full thing coded yet, but here are my rough plans:

• Each bark will have an author, content, datestamp (dynamic based on game time and IRL time?), a rating (+ or - a certain amount), and you can respond to certain barks (mutliple choice dialog?), which may trigger further responses.
• The feed of barks will start at the bottom of the screen and be pushed up by newer ones - you’ll be able to “scroll up” to see the history.
• Certain situations will trigger events - hidden variables that change based on the players choices will cause a specific sequence of barks to be added to the queue.

I’m hoping to get more of this coded this afternoon (it’s currently 3am). Here’s a thought - lets say we aim for a 3 hour game, and a random bark appears every 15 seconds, that’s 720 barks, minimum. Soemthing tells me this is gonna be a massive writing task.

BTW, this genre of writing is called an “Epistolary Novel” - While I’ve never played it, the game Her Story could be considered an Epistolary Novel, just as an example of a game in the same genre. I’ve never seen someone attempt a twitter-like interface, though, so this will be interesting. (Also, god dangit steam sale is nickel and diming me - Her Story has a major discount that I can’t pass up… oh look, my wishlist…)