Blog Things

(Skip below to Game Things if you just want to see the new bee sprite!)

I've finally put together a real blog for sharing progress on the bee game. This blog is built on a new-to-me framework called a static site generator. I've made a few attempts at blogging with Wordpress and other content management systems, but I found most of the ones I tried to be too cumbersome for a single-author blog. They also tended to be limited or difficult to customize.

There are two reasons I chose to use Pelican as my static site generator:

• The first reason is not particularly unique, but it's important to me: individual blog posts are markdown files. As a software developer, I'm very comfortable generating content with markdown, so this was a natural choice.
• The second reason is that Pelican is built on Python. I shouldn't need to customize the generator itself, but if I need to get fancy with the configuration files or edit the generator for any reason, I'll have good odds of figuring it out.

For now, I'm hosting the website through GitLab Pages. GitLab has been a great resource as a solo developer, and despite some recently announced changes, the Free Tier continues to offer everything you need to host your own site, as long as it doesn't get too big.

Game Things

Anyway, the purpose of this blog is to share progress on the bee game. I recently started rebuilding it in Godot after the drama with Unity. So far, it's been pleasant. I took this opportunity to also shift the game to a 2D pixel-art style, and by committing to 2D I've also been able to take advantage of a number of built-in features in Godot that have sped up certain aspects of development significantly.

More to come later; for now, here is the first sprite from the new bee game!