Growth Engine Module (Apr 26-May 2, 2026)

Life Update

Hey everyone!

Me again from Electronic Thinking Humans.

Had a dryer quit on me, so this took time away from my project. It ended up being the motor that went out (~14-15 year old dryer). Rather than replace it thought I’d buy the part and try replacing the motor. Overall it’s not a terribly complicated DYI project, but it sure makes you frustrated once you are working on it. As I don’t see any reason why it should be designed where you have to take the entire thing a part to replace the motor… but you do!

In the end, I broke another part towards the end of finally getting to replace the motor, so this was a bust. I felt like I learned more about dryers though, so oh well.

Dev Progress

This week I wanted to continue fleshing out my upgrade system, as eventually I want several different combinations of upgrades. As I’m a sucker for games like Brotatoe, Ball X Pit, and the like that allow you to get different combinations of upgrades. There is always the surprise aspect of seeing what that upgrades produces in terms of aesthetics and sound but also how best to use it.

But before I go wild creating a bunch of upgrades that I need to tweak and rework to feel right, I first need to focus on getting a prototype upgrade for each type of existing module. That way I know I am creating them correctly from a content perspective and also from a code architecture perspective. As I want to be able to leverage as much reuse as I can, otherwise it will be a nightmare when bugs come up.

Since I haven’t done an engine module upgrade yet that’s where I focused on. Lots of games do burst speed engines, so I was attempting to do something that was somewhat similar to a few games (minishoot adventures and some elements of lovers in a dangerous space time). I went with a rough content prototype of a liquid filling engine. As I think eventually some sort of fluid generating thing makes a lot of sense here for my organic immune system look. I didn’t however want to actually spend time on a liquid system for this tiny engine, so I just did some vector art and transformed the bones a bit to make it look like it’s filling and emptying.

Full Growth Engine Module

Empty Growth Engine Module

Growth Engine Module replacing the engine on the ship. Definitely not final art direction.

My background mostly a programmer, I’m completely use to writing code and needing to throw it away for whatever reason (feature didn’t work, was cut, users didn’t like it or need it, etc), it doesn’t bother me the slightest. Yet when it comes to art/audio/vfx content I’m a novice and it pains me when I spend a decent chunk of time, and it still looks like crap to me… AND I know I’m most likely going to throw it away completely. Funny how that is.

Takeaway

Anyways I’m overall happy with how this prototype turned out for what I was attempting and it hits that moment where I’m like “yeah I can see how this would work” stage. The stage where you can see where you’d devote time tweaking the gameplay and aesthetics to look right and feel semi-confident you can get them to a polished stage later.