--- 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.