First Time Exploring the Godot Game Engine
Celebrating victories is something I'm working to improve at and do more.
Recently I published eight builds of two games, Guitar Fretter and Guitar Fretter Demo Tape. It took months of work and it felt good to get that work into the stores and hands of players. Publishing is a big step and I'm glad to be past that point. There's more work though to keep promoting and sharing to get more players aware and buying the game.
Always more to tend to, maybe that's my hang up about celebrating. Probably part of it anyway. I am still working on figuring out what I do to celebrate finishing stuff.
This does lead to me exploring Godot. It started with publishing then feeling more free creatively than I felt in recent months. Being so focused on getting a big project ready to publish meant I didn't putter and dabble with other playful learning related to making games.
Celebration Part 1: Feeling Free to Explore a New Game Concept
Guitar Fretter is built using the Solar2D platform. Solar2D uses the Lua language and has a good development experience where you put your art, sound, and code in a folder and anytime a file is updated you get to see your game refresh in the simulator.
I'm grateful for the Solar2D platform and was thinking I'd make my next game using it.
Feeling that freedom being out of the development, build, test, publish cycle of Guitar Fretter I did a planning session to design a few game pitches and prototype sketch concepts. Then I started to explore how I'd test the ideas that stood out the most using Solar2D.
Celebration Part 2: Curious to Try Godot
In a given week I see Godot mentioned a few times in my social feeds and it's always positive.
Two days of part time exploring my next game prototype I decided to give Godot a try. First impression it reminds me of Unity since it's a visual editor with multiple panels, allows for making 2D and 3D games, but also is clearly its own thing.
To get a thorough start I chose this tutorial to make a small 2D game.
Adding to the Tutorial
As I built the tutorial game I looked at the list of prototype game elements I drafted to decide which game to make next. I thought of features to explore to see what it's like to do those things with Godot:
- particles after the player gets hit
- particles as the player and creatures move around
- particles as ambience
- game controller input
- how to display word balloons dynamically
- 2D lighting
- animation via tweens (and learned about Godo's AnimationPlayer capability)
For another couple of part time days I wondered how Godot does a thing I hope it could, capture a note, research, then embellish the game a bit more. The whole process was almost too much fun. It reminded me what it felt like to make games in Flash.
I'm Godot-ing to Use Godot for My Next Game
- The project has great documentation and a strong community of people sharing what they've learned.
- It has a good amount of support for publishing to multiple platforms.
Godot uses GDScript which is very similar to Python and that suits me well.
So many good experiences and positive impressions. One small detail is it amazes me that the install of Godot is only a few hundred megabytes.
The most important reason I feel good about this choice:
Godot made sense to learn and keeps rewarding me as I learn more.
The prototyping research went well, now I'm working on my next game using Godot. I'll share more about it soon as I plan to do more working in public with this game than I did with Guitar Fretter.