Making a small platformer to learn more about video games
Lately, I noticed that my games are not fun, or I lack the knowledge to keep working on them, or I avoid prototyping and get stuck right away, and other feelings I have before abandoning a project or posting it in a not fun state, like blocks in bits. I also spent January and February working on my website and other web projects that I wanted to tackle at some point, but I was missing working on game development. It's something I'm passionate about and I want to learn more about it.
So I decided to take a few steps back and try to understand better both working with Godot and learning more about game dev and game design, doing small modules or very little and simple games to understand how those work.
Today I started the first one of a few of my ideas that I want to try to develop, a small platformer game. I will continue this project until I'm satisfied, but I will try not to overdo it. The idea is to keep it super simple in any form.
What I did today:
- For today I started right away creating the project structure and tuning some settings, making a level node by using a tile map, and creating a player with the default movement code. All those took less than an hour to make it work.
I know I should not "waste" time making assets, but I wanted something very simple and fast to start working with. Maybe in the future, I could make my own prototype assets, or grab some on the internet.
I also set up the player camera directly in the player's node. I might try using it on the "game" node (the node I use to manage states and stuff normally), since I become more dependent on signals and globals for information across the game, instead of using export variables.
- After, again I know I shouldn't be focusing on graphics in an initial state, but I decided to make a bit of animation for the player. So I made very simple (and terrible) idle, run, and jump animations. I used the AnimatedSprite2D node, but I need to learn sometime how to properly use the animation tree and the animation player.
- I made the winning condition first (just pick up the flag and nothing happens lol) since there is only one condition for that.
- The enemy I had a problem with since I don't know which nodes are the best for it. The best to move and create a behavior against the player, or just walk around. So far, 2 area2D where when I touch on its head the player can kill it, or if I touch by the front the player gets killed.
- Limits I coded directly on the player, where I can just check positions, and restrain the player. Also, I can check if the player falls and declare the game over (also nothing happens, only freeze the game).
And at the end, I think I need to:
- Do a better organization of the levels. Instead of making it a tile map already, make it a node2D with all the stuff. Also, check how to use the other nodes as tiles.
- A sound manager. The coins are only being removed after the end of the audio stream. Since I don't want to wait for collectibles and enemies to finish their sounds to be removed from the game, I need to see how effectively I manage the sounds I play.
- Check my signals. For the player's death, I send the signal to the game node that they fell down or got killed, and the game node returns it to the player. I don't want to "over-signalling," making redundant signals here and there, but I think it's fine this way since I can make the game node the "source of truth" as well as add different computations if I need for each case.
All this was done in a total of 4h today.
What I plan on do next:
For now, I want to make the enemies work, coins being not dependent on the sound, and organize better the level structure. After all that, I want to focus on showing the player information (win, lose, coins), and create a few menus (quit, restart).
I will not guarantee big dev logs or more information, but I will try my best to continue both the game(s) and those logs with some good information.
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