---
title: A leap forward
author: nek0
tags:
- "devlog: pituicat"
- english
description: Huge progress on my game project!
---

Hi folks, it's me again. I finally managed to settle into new circumstances
regarding my apprenticeship. I'm in my final year and am very much looking
forward to be finished.

With things getting more calm I found some time and motivation to code again,
so I grabbed my current project "Pituicat" and started out implementing my own
abstractions around OpenGL to get stuff on screen. Today I finally made it:

![Screenshot](/images/2020-12-06_preview.png "a blue screen with little a green square in the center")

I know. It doesn't look very overwhelming, but it's a start. The code I wrote
to make this possible should enable me to draw massive amounts of 2D tiles more
efficiently than the library NanoVG does.

This breakthrough is very welcome, since I started considering moving the game
to an engine I do not build myself, namely [Godot](https://godotengine.org/),
which is a powerful free software game engine. I already started to make some
stubs in it, but I seemingly enjoy
[shaving yaks](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html)
far too much...

After this milestone is taken, I can start taking care of the actual in-game
graphics and display them accordingly. Although I'm not absolutely new to
game development, I never actually handled OpenGL myself, so this is a huge,
sometimes fun and sometimes frustrating, learning experience.

At this point I want to thank the Haskell game development community and the
Haskell community in general for being the excellent, friendly and helpful
communities they are.

Also special thanks go to [The Cherno](https://www.thecherno.com/), who has made an
[excellent Video tutorial series on OpenGL](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlrATfBNZ98foTJPJ_Ev03o2oq3-GGOS2)
available on his YouTube channel. Although the tutorial is held in C++ I could
carry most of the concepts over to Haskell and apply them to my needs.

As always, if you want to see my progress with the code, head over to
[project repository on my gitea](https://gitea.nek0.eu/nek0/pituicat).

So much for this update, I hope to see you soon.

Keep calm and wash hands.
