I Keep Jumping Into And Out Of Tutorial Hell

Welcome to tutorial hell! It’s the painful routine of doing tutorials to learn more about your topic, then doing more tutorials to learn more, then doing more tutorials to learn more and then, when you finally try to make something yourself without the help of a tutorial, you find yourself having to consult a tutorial anyway because you don’t actually know enough about the thing you’re working with to do it without help.

At least… that’s been my experience with tutorial hell. I’ve been trying to break out of it but… eh. I’m just not there yet.

Don’t get me wrong! There’s nothing wrong with tutorials. It’s just a natural sort of frustration when you want to work on your creative vision but your skill level doesn’t match yet. It’s like that with any creative art.

While I was able to (mostly) make a crate for Jumping Jack without a tutorial, the dash doesn’t push it quite right and the rock can throw the player. I’m getting there, though. Here’s what it looks like.

I don’t know how to fix that yet. I’m sure I’ll get there. I hope.

Anyway, there’s a short update for you.

Speaking of tutorial hell, here’s a thing I made last night. Enjoy.

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I’m Making A Game Called Jumping Jack! Sorta…

It’s been what… two months? Happy Holidays, Happy New Year and Happy everything else we need to be happy about.

I’ve been keeping this new project under my hat, not for any particular reason, just that it started off as part of a Zenva tutorial project. It’s become something more than that, though.

My thinking was “Hey, I’m stuck in a point of my main project where I can’t really advance further until I learn more but I don’t want to be stuck in tutorial hell forever. I should take this platformer as far as I can and see what happens.”

And now we have this:

It’s a simple platformer and it has an unshown dash feature that I’m ironing out the bugs in, but it works! It’s what I’m using to learn Godot, so I’m not sure what sort of deadlines – if any – I’d be looking at, or roadmaps or whatever. I just hope I continue to have fun learning more about game dev, coding, animating and level design.

I might have more interesting dev logs in the future, but for now I hope you enjoy looking at my little free-time hobby thing.

Here are some things I want to add or fix:

  • More original sprites and animations, obviously
  • Dust particles when the player turns
  • A HUD so that the lives remaining and coin score stand out better
  • More to come, I’m sure

On a tangentially related note, I’ve set a short term goal to make micro-projects of every major game genre. When I say micro I mean eeney weeney teeny tiny. I mean “hey I’m making a turn based RPG with one town, one dungeon, two fights and one boss battle.” I mean “I’m making a neighborvania that has 16 farmable tiles and two people you can form platonic relationships with. Maybe a pet.” I mean “I’m making a first person survivor game where you have one tiny island to live on and you can craft a club and a fire.”

Teeny tiny.

Here’s the list that I’ve come up with so far.

  1. Space shooter DONE – Untitled Asteroids Clone
  2. Platformer
  3. Card Game
  4. Action RPG
  5. Island Survivor
  6. Neighborvania
  7. More to come, I’m sure

Anyway, I think that’s all the updating I have for you today. I’ll pop back in when I have more to talk about. I hope you’ve enjoyed this short read!

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WOW, I finally made a game! – Untitled Asteroids Clone

It’s Untitled Asteroids Clone. A short project I made to help me learn how to use Godot 4.3.

You can check out the Youtube tutorials I used for this project here:

I did add some features myself like the main menu, multiple levels and detecting whether the asteroids are all gone myself, but this tutorial was a great place to get started.

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Holy Crap Where the Hell Have I Been???

Holy crap indeed. It’s been 4 years! Ish. I don’t know, I didn’t think to check the date I last posted before this.

ANYWAY, I’m a mom now but I haven’t lost my passion for geeky and nerdy things and I’d like to get back into the swing of blogging. I’m learning how to use Godot now and I want to track my progress as I learn… somewhere. Which is where this space comes in. I’ve got the domain, I’m paying for it, I might as well use it, right?

Anyway, this is just a quick “Hello!” sort of post. I don’t have a publishing schedule or anything, so I’ll see you when I see you.

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