Play My Game Here
Per usual I used this jam to program in a new tool or language: Godot Engine.
Consider myself a Godot Engine fan after using it for the first time this weekend. It was super intuitive although the docs make a bit of assumptions that you are familiar with other tools or languages.
Friday Night
1. “Early Learnings” – I spent Friday night reading docs and just playing around in a test project. It turns out Godot Engine absolutely just needs a right mouse button for some context menu interaction especially for deleting.
1.5 ( Not pictured ) Brainstorming terrible ideas with friends on Facebook and writing down everything I could think of in my notebook. The original idea was I liked was to do a serious game about migration in the US as a result of Air Conditioning and Refrigeration ( I grew up in Las Vegas. ) However, as implied from my previous games I love going for humor, so me making a serious game didn’t feel right. From there I thought about how to get people to think about things that are still in use but take for granted sort of a “diamond in the rough” type feel so started tweaking minesweeper or battleship like mechanics. The optional popups gave me the chance to be both humorous and educational so I decided I liked the idea enough to go with it. Plan B was to go meta and learn Fortran… I’m glad I went with plan A.
Saturday Morning
2. Set up a basic scene graph of game states first so I wouldn’t need to refactor them in later. Godot’s scenes are closer to unity prefabs than unity scenes.
3. First Gameplay grid
4. Sidebar UI and popups. Man, UI always takes forever.
5. First pass at backgrounds. At this point I was still deciding whether or not I wanted the hidden objects to take up multiple tiles like in battleship and have people find them by silhouettes. Once I saw this however, I thought I could do a cool heatmap by setting color on the verticies and I didn’t want to have to pick objects based on shape so design decision made.
6. Did a “level progression state” to show progress. I think this is a good applied lesson from previous game jams, just pick 3 – 5 levels and then people will be done. I also chose to cut my planned “Shovel Durability” because I realized a lose state isn’t always needed.
Saturday Afternoon
7. Verifying my scaling grid sizes and randomness worked.
8. Real Art going in and wrote descriptions of things past level 1. Art was just from around the internet, tried to find free creative commons photos takes awhile.
Saturday Night
9. PARTICLES!!!! No game engine can be properly judged without them. Also game awesomeness x100 at this step.
Sunday Morning
10. Decided I had time for fancy gradients officially rather than the big chunky blocks since it seemed like I wasn’t getting called into work. More buggy iteration of me breaking the game here.
11. Mostly working
Sunday Afternoon
12. Final testing, and screenshot taking before uploading.
Play My Game Here
I’ll write up more on my personal blog once I’ve slept at http://www.MollyJameson.com
