I wear many hats. Expect chaos.
You guys, I did it. I entered a game jam!
The game is called Discount Destroyer and it’s a scrolling space shooter. I might work on it more after the jam, but for now I’m going to take a break.
Updates to JJ will resume soon, but if you’re wondering why I’ve been quiet, it’s because I’ve been diligently working on Discount Destroyer.
First, the exciting stuff! Graphics!
A while ago I picked up the Multi Platformer Tileset by Shackhal when itch.io was doing their Bundle for Racial Justice back in 2020. It’s likely going to be the final tileset that I use and I think it really fits the aesthetic that I’m shooting for in the game. I’m still stumbling around a little bit as I learn more about tilemaplayers but I’m learning a lot as I go.
Speaking of the aesthetic, I’ve renamed the project “Looking for Spring” because it matches the story of the game a lot better. I don’t love the name, but it fits better and I’m open to suggestions. In-house, I’m still calling it JJ for short, but I guess that’s the purpose of working titles.
Next, mechanics.
I completely reworked the rocks. They’re no longer physics objects, they’re actually Area2Ds with some rudimentary “physics” attached to them. It’s all an illusion and it isn’t a very convincing one. At least it works. I’m a baby programmer so I’m going to cut myself some slack here and there.
If you’d like to see some of my rock-related failures, check them out just below. They’re pretty funny.
I’ve also got the first level of the game completed. It was equal parts proof-of-concept, testing-ground and a way for me to cut my teeth on level design and I’m very happy with it. The level even features these little one-way platforms.
I’m very proud of the “jumping down” feature I made for that, too.
Oh, and I got parallax backgrounds now. Yay!
Next, the behind-the-scenes stuff.
I know, it’s extremely exciting.
You can guess from the screenshot that you can now save and load the game and now the game will load and unload game levels into the level controller as needed.
The level controller makes it much easier for me to handle screen transitions and it’ll also prevent the screen from resizing whenever the player moves on from one level to another. This was a problem I noticed in other games that don’t use a system like this.
I, foolishly, decided to add the save/load system after I made some decent progress in the game, but I’m very happy with how it works and I’ll be using it in future games.
I’ve still got a ways to go before I’m truly finished with the game. I still need to make the save/load system something that the player can actually use in-game. I still need to add a status bar of some kind (even if it only shows the amount of health JJ has left). I still need to add a main menu… And of course I still need to design the levels, make sprites, all of it. It’s going to be a lot of work.
To keep from over scoping, I’ve decided to go ahead and get rid of a few mechanics I’d orignally had planned for this game. I got pretty burnt out trying to figure out the rocks in particular, but I think this will ultimately be a great thing for the game. I can narrow my focus and work on just making a good puzzle platformer game. It’ll still have enemies and hazards, of course, but those will also be kept pretty simple.
Anyway, I hope you liked this update! It’s been a couple weeks, but I promise I’ve been steadily working on the game this whole time.
If you’d like to catch a stream of my afternoon game dev time, you can find me here on twitch:
If you’d like to catch my VODs after the fact, you can find them on my Game Dev channel here:
www.youtube.com/@KezuneTwitchDevs
I have neither a regular streaming or publishing schedule because of work, kids and life, but if you do happen to see my streams or videos, I hope you enjoy them.
Anyway, that’s everything I have for you today. Thank you for reading!
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.
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:
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.
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!
