Trying out the Godot engine

Recently I had an opportunity to join the Stop Waiting For Godot jam – aptly named as a final push to motivate anyone interested in the open-source Godot game engine to give it a go.

As a weekend activity, I didn’t dive in too deep – I had spent the weekdays leading up to the jam on reading the excellent documentation. I think my concept could have ended up being quite fun.

           STORY

 WHEN GRANDPA PASSED AWAY,

HE LEFT HIS VINTAGE TRADING

 CARD COLLECTION SCATTERED

       IN THE ATTIC.

 I'M GOING TO FIND THEM ALL

   AND SELL THEM ONLINE.

 IT'S WHAT GRANDPA WOULD

        HAVE WANTED.

By the time the jam finished, I only had a very simple area to walk on, with very simple sprites. However, the walking, collisions, and Y-sorting seem to work fine.

My impressions from this experience are:

• I’ve spent a fair amount of time learning how to create tilemaps that would sort properly.
• Affinity Designer is not a bad tool for creating pixel art assets while simultaneously composing them with vector art (e.g. for reference). However, disabling sub-pixel movement and constantly grouping layers to rasterise (flatten) them was a necessity.
• There seems to be an audio issue in webgl exports – plenty of crackling and stuttering at all times – which happens on my Windows machine (no problems on Mac OS).

His name is Tobias and he sure is walking.

This was also the first time I had tried out beepbox.co to create music for a game. The web-based music tracker turned out to be perfect for a game jam scenario, as I had a solid retro-sounding track in 10-15 minutes. Since that time, I ran into its limitations – such as track length, and a maximum of 8 patterns per one of the 4 instrument tracks. For this case, it was a great tool.

Thank to JapanYoshi for the wonderful fonts. The end result is playable here.