# november 2020: dear diary

december 1, 2020
#blogging #bottle #skills #webdev

## on topic

Between the 8th and 15th, I wrote a Python script for generating Godot skill scenes from JSON files. As opposed to the questionnaire script I used before, this one can generate multiple skills at a click of a button. It isn't a perfect solution either, though, since my JSON script and the skills I have in the game aren't synced. It'd be better for the skills to be something like JSON files that are read by the game at run-time, unless that would be too costly. That way, I only edit skills in one location and don't need to worry about different versions.
Skill inheritance is more sophisticated now and allows the script to generate a lot of the functionality of most types of skills now.
I spend a lot of time on how to make skills because this is a core mechanic of my game, and I plan to have a hundred or more of them. I need an efficient way to update and create the game's skill pool.
On November 24, 2020, I finally added a diary navigation bar under the diary snippets, so you don't have to scroll back up to go to the next page anymore. I was really putting that off for how essential that is.
On November 25, 2020, I began retroactively adding diary entries based on old tweets. I added one for my pixel font, one for my Weekly Game Jam submission, one for my inventory system diagram, and one for blessfrey's graphic updates. I finally got Bottle to support self-hosted images instead of using Imgur for everything (lol), and fixed lots of bugs related to actually having embedded images in articles.
As cool as it is to work on gamedev, this website is also a priority for me as a sort of portfolio. So it would be nice to have lots of articles about my process and different projects. It would be super nice to have pretty graphics everywhere, but as usual, the placeholders are probably going to stay around for a while since they're already half-decent-looking.
November 26, 2020 is Thanksgiving during a pandemic. Wrote up an article for my pretendOS game and my coroutines example. Also, the diary shows 8 snippets per page instead of 4. I finally have enough articles to test an optimal amount shown per page.
November 27, 2020 is Black Friday. I ordered navy eye shadow and fancy sunscreen. Added an article for skill phases + super methods and slimeAI's state transition diagram.
November 28, 2020 is my birthday. I replaced the game page with a projects page with pretty CSS grid formatting and little thumbnail links to different projects, either to diary entries or git repos.
November 29, 2020, I make sure all the thumbnails are consistent sizes for the projects page make the images and descriptions into links. I also add a thumbnail for the website itself because why not? It doesn't have anything suitable to link to, so I wrote up an article explaining blessfrey.me's development. I touched up the presskit page and added a PDF download to the page. Downloads are way easier to add than I thought they'd be - seriously took me less than a minute. The presskit page is still ugly, but at least it has better images on it now. I'm getting close to actually letting people see my website (even though it's been publicly accessible pretty much since August but whatever), so I went through my articles again and improved their readability and removed most stuff that isn't really relevant.
November 30, 2020, I reordered the diary entries again. The daily diaries really should be released after the month is over instead of on the last day of the month. Duh. Also, the 3-week-nonstop-earworm of Seungri's "Let's Talk About Love" finally went away. It was becoming pathological.

## off-topic

I joined a Japanese manga translation group on a whim and now provide Japanese-to-English transcripts for a new chapter of a manga about every week and a half. It wasn't obvious, but understanding Japanese is a different skill than rewriting Japanese into English while keeping the jokes, character voice, and cliffhangers/foreshadowing intact;;
Also, Election Day-turned-Weeks took up a few extra days of nonstop news watching than it usually does, even though I tuned out long before Georgia was called.