I'm going to explain what I've been doing, but first I need to explain why I went AWOL (and later on, why I will go AWOL again).
>What happened
Nothing bad happened. As you can probably tell, I was in a rut, but it became more than that and I began to hate what I was doing. This isn't something I was expecting because I have thought about game development since adolescence, so once I realized how fed up I was with the process I stopped cold turkey. I blame it mostly on my focus on theory rather than practical experience because I am not a naturally studious person, but I force myself. I burned myself out just reading pages of documenation and manuals on Lua, Git, LÖVE, and Blender, and not doing anything with it, so I stepped away. The first week was convincing myself to follow through, and the second was just writing every single thought about the game on paper, which I really enjoyed doing and that's what gave me the confidence to try again.
>The project
It's a very simple word game where you guess acronyms of quotes, sayings, lyrics, whatever. It's presented for a mobile interface because I wanted to try my hand at design and not deal with the hell that is web development. You select an acronym and then it goes to a play screen where you make your guess. Very simple stuff, but it played into my work on databases, string manipulation, and interface design without having to deal with assets.
>What I've done
The first thing I tried to do was work on a scrolling list, but then I realized that Lua didn't have a CSV library, so I wrote a CSV file parser that converts a CSV file to a key-value table. While I say CSV, I'm not going to pretend that it's compliant with standards because I did not read them, but for my purposes, it does exactly what it needs to do and the only caveats are that the file must be sanitized of extra newlines and each entry is enclosed in double quotes. The next thing I did was work on the listing functionality, where each entry in the database is converted into an object that can be scrolled through for level selection. This also works and you can scroll through by clicking and dragging with the mouse. There is still much work to be done on this, but I feel impelled to do the play screen. I can also do basic git now.
>What I'm doing right now
I'm currently working on the keyboard. My strategy thus far is to store each row as a string then print each individual character on the screen. The theory is that this should allow for alternative keyboards like AZERTY or DVORAK just by listing the keys, not that I plan to add options, but I really want to avoid hardcoding things.
>What's next