I bought my first camera a few years ago, so I can give you the advice others have told me. The lens is more important than the camera, and it’s good to get into a decent lens ecosystem. I personally use a ZVE-10 (even though I mainly do photo, as it was significantly cheaper than the A6400 in my region. Lack of EVF sucks though, so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that only wants to do photo)

If you want to go for the Sony ecosystem, the a6400 is a good pick. Lots of people also like the a6300 (older version of a6400), a6100 (older entry-level camera), and the a6000 (another older camera).

For E-mount lenses, good general-pirpose zooms would be the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 and the Tamron 17-70mm f2.8. The Sigma primes are very sharp, but lots of people also like the more affordable TTArtisans and Viltrox lenses that are almost, if not equally, as sharp.

If you prefer the Canon ecosystem, you could either go with a DLSR (bigger and heavier, but usually cheaper) or mirrorless (lighter, but a bit more expensive). I don’t know much about it though, so I can’t tell you anything more than that.

There’s also Nikon, Fujifilm, and the L-mount alliance, but I don’t know much about any of them all too much.

I remember someone told me that Sony has great AF, Canon and Nikon both have good colours, Fujifilm has film simulations + more retro control dials/design, and L-mount is a shared mount between Panasonic, Olympus/OM System, and Leica (so you can mix and match lenses and cameras between those three) and also give you M43 (sensor is smaller than APS-C, but more compact lenses). If you go with any of those ecosystems you’ll be fine, they all make good cameras.

I use SearXNG, which is a “metasearch” engine that aggregates results from lots of different ones (you are able to choose whether you want to include google results, ddg results, etc.) and there’s also a bunch of options for searching images, videos, files, and more!

It can be self-hosted or you could always use a public instance (but then that means you have to trust whoever is hosting it with your data)

Ah ok that makes sense. Very cool. I’ll probably just stick with my system, since it works for me :D

If there was a “key” for every dialogue, that table would get ridiculously long. All the dialogue text is only being used once anyways, so it’s just making it more complicated for, in my opinion, little to no reason.

Using a lookup table for the emotions and character could be interesting though. I prefer my solution of just having all those dialogue objects since it’s simple and works for my use case. In Godot with the “quick load” feature you can find the different sprites very fast. Also, not changing the dialogue system means I can keep using the same one for all my games, so less work to do :D

How my dialogue box works is by having a “Dialogue” object that has three parameters: the text, the avatar, and the duration (longer dialogues wait for 5s, shorter could be 3s). And in each “conversation”, it’s pretty much looping through an array of these dialogue objects. So for every conversation there is in the game, I would have to change the dialogue objects of each one.

And I don’t think I can map it to specific textures since I have multiple textures for different expressions (happy, shocked, angry, etc.) and am likely going to add more in the future so I can’t really hard code that in.

It’s quite a bit of work for something that I find mostly unnecessary as all the characters introduce themselves when you meet them and there is a clear visual distinction (different shapes, colours, etc.) between all of them.

On adding the character names to the dialogue box, I don’t think I’ll do that. It’s too much work to change EVERY SINGLE dialogue and all the characters introduce themselves anyways. I think all the dialogue sprites are unique enough (Player is the duck, Prometheus is the human with golden hair, the winds are their own thing, the narrator is a donut thing, etc.)

if it’s not a bird nor a plane, it must be superman!

a font that’s free for personal use called “Cute Pixel”

The duck is friends with everyone :D

edit: wait you weren’t talking about the duck

I don’t have a title for the game yet, but something similar to that could be the title! I’ll have to decide that later though. Right now the project title is “Prometheus and the Gods”, but that will almost certainly be changed as Prometheus isn’t the main character, the duck is.

Maybe something like “Duck against the Gods”. I’ll have to figure out a name at some point

A better look at the particles with the parallax background and player visible. Do the particles look any good, and if not, how should I change them to look better?

Also, the rain particles are attached to the CanvasLayer, but that also means the rain isn’t really in the world. Having the rain particles over the whole world would be kind of a stupid idea: that’s a lot of particles. Is it possible to make the particles “scroll” kind of like a scrolling background? Putting it in a ParallaxLayer didn’t work, so there’s probably some way I could do it with GDScript.

I’ve also made this monstrosity…I wonder what will it do…

I’ve got some lighting now and it looks really cool! No normal maps yet though, so I might get to that at some point…

Ah ok. Everyone makes mistakes, it’s all fine and good :D

No, I wasn’t born yet…

later down the line I might add a few more nature deity abilities, but I think four is probably enough.

That makes sense, the Greeks has a bunch more gods and deities and such they worshipped.

In my game I’m also including four of the nature deities, Helios (the sun god), Achelous (the river god of the Achelous river), the winds, and Gaia (the Earth). The idea is that you can interact with the totems to use their abilities (e.g. Gaia totem would heal you)

that does look really cool! I’ll have to do that at some point…I should probably make the player sprite first though, right now it’s a recoloured version of the one from HeartBeast’s tutorial.

The idea is that you explore each god’s “realm” and at the end there’s some sort of boss fight where you have to knock out the god to steal their “fire” (e.g. mastery of the seas from Poseidon) for the humans

edited to mention it’s the Greek ones and not the Roman ones. Or did I do something else wrong…?