Author: Lee Buermann
Publish Date: August 4, 2024
Game Update
This week I don't have much of a Business update so we'll switch to a straight game update. I managed to actually sit down and work on the game itself for a few days. One of the less "fun" aspects of game development is all of the UX that players expect to have, that isn't really gameplay. This week I've been updating several of the menus from just barely functional to a little more asethetically pleasing and useful. This isn't the sort of thing you dream about when starting your first game, but as you launch your early builds you really start to feel how spending a little bit of extra care in on the menus makes your game feel better.
I've alluded to this before, but one of the things that I've been trying to keep in mind this time around is that "perfect code" doesn't exist. I'm trying my best to fight the software engineer in me to optimize too early. I think I really spent a lot of time in past attempts trying to make my code "beautiful" instead of trying to get the game to function. This also comes from some career experience and seeing a lot of effort go into projects that eventually get scrapped because they took too long. There's obviously a quality bar to clear, but something is almost always better than nothing. If I can get a system or idea to mostly work, I've been doing that and moving on. I can always circle back to clean it up when time allows. Zeroing in on getting a decent "loop" in my game, and iterating from there has really sped up my progress.
However - now that I've got the gameplay loop complete, I can circle back to things like menus to give them a little TLC. Thankfully Godot makes re-using customized Menu Items and "cards" fairly easy. One of the biggest shifts I made is in the Save File selection screen. These were just buttons that didn't tell the player anything before, and now they're full on cards that display some stats about that save. I then started to apply a similar aesthetic to all the menus in the game. I think the before and after is serious progress:
Story Time: What kind of theme or characters are in this thing?
This week was my wife and I's 6th wedding anniversary, which is a very fitting week to tell the the story of how I came up with the main character for my first game.
When I first started building this thing, I had placeholder art for everything. Heck the doors in my screenshots above STILL are placeholders from a free pack on itch.io. I highly recommend doing that for anyone starting to dabble. There's no sense getting bogged down with sprite creation, when you're trying to learn a game engine. However, because of that I always knew I'd have to circle around to swapping those placeholders out for some actual art that I created. But - I'm not usually the creative type so this part worried me. As I was brainstorming ideas for this, I remembered a cheap date night my wife and I had done a few weeks earlier.
We had decided to try the ever trendy art challenge where you and your partner paint for 10 minutes and then swap canvases. On the attempt, I had painted a fairly abstract set of shapes and my wife had painted the entire background of the canvas a nice slate blue. I won't say too much more about that "abstract art piece" I started, it really got out of hand but you can see it in the banner image. On top of the slate blue background, I attempted to paint a door opening into a shadow. Going for a bit of a Doctor Who wibbly wobbly timey wimey idea. But, I really messed up the perspective and the angle of the shadow. I passed that back, and my wife saw where I was headed and added a bunch of twinkling stars onto this space based landscape. On my turn, I thought my door really looked more like a duck's head. So I painted the rest of the duck and a space duck was born!
So I decided to make this goofy painting into the main character of my game. But what about a name? Well - there's also been a bit of an inside joke about the ducks that wander around our backyard. I contest that the duck is the same one every year and that their name is Puddles. So why not? Puddles the Space Duck.
The last thing to do here was get some concept art so that I have ideas on what I'm going to translate into a 2D sprite. This is a bit controversial, but as a one person developer I turned to generative AI to give me some ideas. Now - I don't plan on using AI generated images directly in my game, but I've used things like ChatGPT to get some creative juices flowing in the past. I might post a longer form thing in the future about where I draw the line on this stuff and why, but for now I'll just post the output I got from DALL-E when looking for a slate blue space duck. Some of these are so painfully cute, I hope I'm successful enough to eventually get an actual artist to make something based on this and make a plushy or something.
I took those concepts and wound up drawing my low pixel count model that you can see in the home page banner or the pause menu screenshots above. Honestly, I think I can maybe do better but its passable for now. I'm hoping I get enough time to take one more pass at it and maybe do a higher pixel count sprite.
Sign Off
That's it for this week. I'm still barreling towards getting my steam page set up and trying to get an announcement trailer recorded and edited. Next week I'll talk a little bit more about the game play loop I've decided on and how I'm designing levels.
Thanks again for reading and following along!
Lee