Afterword

So here's how it went:

I've not really ever made a game... kinda... I wrote a Tetris in C a millionty years ago, but that's a whole 'nother business.

The idea for this game came about when I was browsing through Jams and found a short one I thought I'd enter to see how it went. Surprise: It didn't go. It was 100 minutes and, well, this is being posted a month later so... maybe you could argue it fit in the 100² minutes time limit... right?

Alas.

So, what did I achieve?

I made a game. It has an intro screen, some sort of game over/main menu, and there is gameplay. You know what, I'm not even gonna do the usual "it's awful but it's mine" thing. It's mine and it's OK.

What I learned.

Godot is awesome. The people on the Godot discord are... nice... It's sometimes hard to get your questions answered because there is just a LOT of people there.

Godot is easy. I actually finished a game, and I'm honestly still processing it. It's been way easier than I expected it. There's a model you need to wrap your head around at first, but once you understand it, the whole tooling makes sense.

Godot is annoying. Death by a thousand papercuts... This is a pixel-art game. In Godot-land this means that for every asset you need to go back and remove the "Filtered" option from the Import panel so everything isn't blurry. I enabled "Autosave" and "Clear blank lines on save". Godot isn't smart enough to realize that it shouldn't clear the spaces on the line you just typed, so I disabled that option... Sometimes you click on a line and the cursor goes below where you thought. Sometimes you type a line partially, which causes the parser to run and your cursor jumps to the next line for some reason??????? Still, none of those is enough to make me leave Godot, because it's Libre.

Sounds matter a lot. I tend to play games on mute because I'm usually watching something, but just hearing a THWACK when your character hits an enemy makes it HELLA satisfying.

Assets are plentiful. Man, people are great at making art.

A little bit of randomness goes a long way. If the enemies were a little bit spread around randomly, they'd look so much nicer. Also randomizing how much damage they do, how far away they can attack... it's the little things.

Itch rocks. I'm amazed at the amount of people who saw my game. I'd prefer if they'd played it, sure, but knowing they see it is encouraging.

Sometimes... done matters more than perfect. I added the upgrades panel quickly. It's not a great feat of engineering, but that doesn't matter if the other option is not to publish it.

Practice building parts. The best thing you can do is make, say, one platform controller. Like, just one character moving around in a world. Don't worry about making a level for it. When you're done, just remember that you built it and be done with it. Another time, build an AI or something. Another time, build a level... and so on. Just make things. THEN, when you're actually making a thing, you can pick the parts from previous projects.

What went wrong.

I didn't finish nearly on time; of course, it was because I had little idea what I was even doing.

It has basically no features; like, different kinds of enemies might have been nice.

What went right.

The tools were awesome. The assets were easy to find. I even learned a bit on how to stream.

The parts I had done earlier made starting the game hella easy.

I built a slightly larger library of tools to use for the next time.

Closing.

In the end, I had fun. I'm looking forward for the next one, and I might try to make it with a team.