"Hello, World!"

Welcome to my blog.

My name is Andrew and I've been a gamer my entire life. I love games so much, that I've also been making them for fun over the last decade. I started this blog to structure my thoughts and reflect as I work on my current project, and also to provide any insight possible into game development for those interested in learning or following the process.

And hopefully be mildly entertaining. Maybe.

I'm currently making a game using the Godot engine. Guh-DOH, or GO-dot? I prefer guh-DOH because it reminds me of the play "Waiting for Godot" which amuses me. You can pronounce it however you prefer.

Godot is an open source, C++ engine that uses their own scripting language, GDScript, that sits on top of it. It's similar to Python. In their next big release, you will be able to code in Python and C# which is exciting.

I've used numerous different game engines, and Godot is a fantastic choice. I'd highly recommend checking it out if you have any interest, here. Godot is an accessible game engine that has a growing community and lots of great features.

This is the guy they use in some example projects, GBot. The way he stares into your soul, he sort of looks like he's going to tear you apart, Terminator-style. But I'm sure he wouldn't do that.

I started learning Godot, did a couple game jams with it, and decided I was going to use it to make my next game. But what game would that be, exactly? Well, I did a game jam a while ago where the theme was "Unconventional Weapon". Pretty interesting theme as almost every game I play is pretty standard as far as weapons go. People were discussing it, and I saw a tweet that something to the effect of:

"For an extra challenge, also have your weapon not be lethal."

That grabbed me.

For some reason, that idea wriggled into my brain and lit it up with interest. I don't know why, but I distinctly remember the moment I read it and it resonated with me. So ok, we have "Unconventional Weapon", and something non-lethal. Piece of cake, right? Not so much. I spent a good few hours that evening brainstorming ideas and I came up with alright ones but nothing quite stuck.

At around midnight that Friday after the theme was announced, I had whittled down my list of ideas to just a few. One idea I had was about how in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Dr. Strange's character could turn enemies into crates that you could then throw at other bad guys, or break open for items. I thought the concept of turning enemies into objects instead of fighting them directly had potential.

Then I thought "What if you could turn enemies into objects that instead of just being throwaway objects, were actually useful and important to advance through the level?" This felt like it was going somewhere and I quickly prototyped out some designs. The end result was basically a platformer like Mario where you have a gun, but your gun doesn't kill anything- it turns enemies into objects to be used to solve puzzles.

Surrounded by hordes of monsters. That look sort of like they would be cute, tiny pets. The Shih Tzus of monsters, if you will.

That's a screenshot from the game jam build that I did. Really simple game basically those red guys, or "snails" as I referred to them, are the bad guys and you can shoot them to turn them into ice cubes which you can then push like blocks to stand on and reach higher places, to hold down buttons to open doors, you get the idea. I had other ideas for hazards and puzzle elements like spikes, teleporters, lasers, etc. As well as some other enemies that turn into unique objects with different properties.

So basically nothing special as far as a platformer goes- the interesting element is the core mechanic of being able to shoot enemies and turn them into puzzle pieces, essentially. I decided I was fine with a slower paced, more puzzle-centric game that caused you to think a little bit instead of relying on fast-twitch reflexes and just trying to kill things to succeed. And I think it's a fun concept to play with. Here is an new screenshot of my current build:

"Vanquish your foes by turning them into ice cubes!" isn't that sexy of an elevator pitch, I guess. Also yeah, that is a random chair on the right.

My artistic skills aren't so great, I come from a design/writing/coding background. But I am working on some nicer tiles, and better art assets in general. I have 6 levels currently in the game with some other mechanics like moving platforms, button/door combos, spikes, and more. I have a lot more coded and ready to go as far as mechanics are concerned, and even more designed out, I just need to sit down and build more levels next.

I also rigged up my player and got a lot of his animations done, I'll try to get some gifs of the animations of the gameplay itself with them in it for the next post. I can also talk about some of the other enemies and the puzzle elements. Looking forward to going over all the new content I've been working on.

Thanks for reading, until next time.