Week in Review #29: Countdown

I finished my game for the GMTK 2026 game jam! Play Five to Nine. My not-engine, Dollhouse, ended up working great. I made some improvements to collision detection and animation management and camera movement and dialog UI, and—this is the most interesting part to me—none of it was specific to this game. I could plop new Ink and GLTF files in front of this same script and it would be something entirely different. I also spent some time working on the asset pipeline and development workflow. I wrote a script that watches the .blend file and automatically re-exports it whenever it saves. Then in debug mode, the game saves my location and story state to the browser's storage, so I can save a change in Blender, switch to the browser, refresh, and see my changes. The next time I work with Dollhouse I want to add hot reloads so that I don't even need to refresh. I have some reservations about Ink for this type of game. I had to sort of build around a lot of its features, but it also worked…