This week, and this new year, I started with new goals and achievements for myself.

These goals are set amongst my work life, family life, and other personal hobby-type goals for my own personal creativity and to keep my brain ticking.

For work, I plan on completing more courses to enable me to upgrade my position on a more regular basis, with the goal to get a permanent position around the 2027 year.

For my hobbies, I will continue to do my photography journey but have given myself an extra push to get more involved with my SL Colonies project that I have had going for numerous years now. And with that, I have been learning various new skills, including Lua Scripting, due to Second Life bringing in a coding language known as SLua. The aim is that they will integrate LSL with Lua, which is a Roblox scripting language, to hopefully make it easier for creators thinking about joining Second Life.

Roblox Coding

With the above, came the obvious move while learning Luau that I would learn best by creating my own game within .

I decided to build a game called The Colony, which I will work on over the years - just for myself - not really any other purpose.

It will be a blend of my Counter Earth world that I have always wanted to build, and a bit of 28 Years Later type of gameplay, where players will be able to kill zombies and earn rewards.

Roblox Studio is fun to work with, and seeing the different path this company went with as opposed to with .

Roblox is very much built from the ground up to offer all the tools necessary for creators to get involved, and they cover all the costs. The way they make money is from the players engaging in their creators’ creations. Unlike Second Life, who make their money directly off the creators.

People have compared Roblox to YouTube in that sense.

Special Effects

I posted a little video of a HUD I already put together that has a special effect on energy and health being consumed.

Players will see a vignette start appearing around their screen, and also start hearing heavy breathing and a heartbeat effect.

I recorded the sounds myself and coded all this by myself (using the help of and AI, of course!).

I actually like that you can code directly within Roblox Studio and see your changes live. And using on the side under a project folder and building from there.

Udemy & Blender

During this week, I also signed up to , which helped me with a lot of the coding in Luau.

During scripting and getting to a point that I am ready to build a tutorial area for my game, there was a decision I had to make.

Would I use other people’s assets for the mesh design, or create my own?

I tried using AI to make 3D mesh for my game, but the triangles and polys are way too high. These sorts of games prefer models that are in the 1,000 to 10,000 tris max, and the outputs of models I was getting from AI were sometimes well over 300,000. So without having a good basic understanding of modelling, the work needed to downscale is intense.

What better way than to learn on my own and learn to model from the ground up and just use AI to help with texturing, references, images to work with, and the likes?

Use AI as a tool, not a replacement.

SL Colonies

With the learning of Luau scripting and modelling, came a new passion to get involved directly with model creation for my lifelong passion project, SL Colonies.

Makes me feel quite accomplished. I know being the visionary behind world-building is fascinating in itself. Coming up with massive ideas and making a thriving community. Directing development and the direction of the game in general is no small feat.

But we are an indie team. It is Drakkhis and me doing this and having only the one coder means progress has been slow over the years.

When I started the game, I had a mesh designer help out making our crafting stations and items. But then he went off and did his own thing, which was fashion within Second Life, and he started his own business, which is great, but also meant that we had no more mesh designer.

We started to use a lot of full-perm items created in the SL Marketplace, which helped a lot. But this meant that some of our products were not really unique in design.

Drakkhis dabbles in some modelling, but that also means that instead of focusing his efforts on coding, he is also having to spend time modelling everything together.

What better way to close the gap than to learn modelling myself? Making the creations myself and handing it to our coder to make it work?

Well, that’s the mission I set out for myself to commence the following week!

Conclusion

This week was all about perspective and self-learning. Which I have done.

Next week, I am taking the family to Brisbane to visit cousins and other family up there, and to have a bit of a holiday and have fun with our family.

I will be bringing the laptop, and I will be learning my modelling and making my first models to use within Second Life.

I am thinking of a Chilli Plant that players have been asking for, and a Cherry Tree that the community has been begging for, for quite some time, but we have put it on the back burner for so long because we have to focus on the bigger ticket coding items!

With me on modelling, it means I can push out more new products that we already have usable code for!

Exciting times ahead!