Welcome

Hi, everyone! This is a new blog based on coding and development of games, Minecraft servers/plugins, etc. I've been getting into coding again, and I'd like to share my work with others. This means I'll be posting games on here, code, Skript "code," plugins (once I get a good enough computer that I can actually test them), and servers. I'll gladly take questions and answer them if I can (go ahead and comment if you can and I'll reply if it's simple or make a new post if it's not. I may also create a form to ask questions or a Discord server if this blog actually picks up any attention.

Currently I'm working on a game that's kind of like a mix between Atari Breakout and Ballz, with a little something extra. I'm not entirely sure what to call it, but basically the point of the game is to break as many blocks as possible without them catching up to you. There's only one ball, but it bounces off all four walls of the game and you have a paddle to bounce it where you choose. It seems like you would be able to eventually get it no matter what, but the ball has health (originally 20, then +2 for every level) and it's damaged by the blocks (I may change this to it being damaged by the walls and perhaps paddle instead). As it is, you can heal the ball with the paddle, but the paddle is a bit slower than the ball so that it's hard to catch.

I've also been working on some Minecraft plugins. I put a pause on those, though, because my current computer is... not great. Let's just say even that simple game I described above gets laggy sometimes. So I currently can't test any of my plugins because I can't download a server onto my computer and I can't add my own plugins to my online hosted servers. So I'll have to wait to release those to see if they work, but the one I started with, if it goes as planned, is pretty much finished. Basically, I made a calendar that updates in real time (so you don't have to put in the date or time, it knows the date and time, something not accessible in any other plugin I've found, even Skript) and you can host events in. You can book an event from a player or console with the /book command, and see the calendar in-game with /calendar. With that command, it'll pop up an inventory with glass panes where empty days are and blue panes for days with events. The hardest part of this one was making sure that no matter what day of the week the month started on, it would always display the days in the second column for Sundays, third for Mondays, etc until the 8th column for Saturdays--there are 9 columns no matter what, so I had to have a buffer on each end.

Once I can test my plugins and get back to plugin development, the other plugin I was working on was a board/cardgames plugin. Basically, I have a server (gameboards.minehut.gg, you can book it as is I just have to do more work and you can't play Settlers of Catan :() where people can play different board games like Pictionary, Boggle, Codenames, Scrabble, Connect 4, and Checkers that I've made in Skript (I haven't added the Scrabble or Codenames scripts to the game yet, though). I had two problems with making the server in Skript though: 1) the whole time thing (see last paragraph) and 2) whenever I tried to play Settlers of Catan, which I was so proud of, the whole server would crash. I know that the script to initialize the game worked before I defined all 19 hexes, so my theory is that Skript (and/or the server) just can't handle that big of a loop. I know that the error it showed in the console was just that the server hadn't responded for 10 seconds, exactly 10 seconds after I input the command every time. If I can make all of these games in a Java plugin, hopefully that'll resolve that issue as long as I can optimize the code.

For now, I'm just going to finish debugging the first game I mentioned and make it pretty, then I'll move onto making Boggle so my family and I can play it together over Zoom. I'm going to start with a simple thing for a screenshare, but I hope to eventually get it working on internet--wish me luck! This is a journey we're all on together, and we can all learn to code and make our own games!

Recommended YouTube channels (not a promotion these are just people who've helped me out):

CodedRed (for Minecraft plugin development specifically)

RealTutsGML (for game development)