Thoughts on Wing-Pack Joyride

What a journey! This game was such a fun roller coaster of trial and error. Trying new things, fixing bugs and mistakes. Ultimately, putting together this awesome game allowed me to learn so much about Godot, animation and game deving. It was a blast! So now the important questions to answer, what did I do? and what did I learn?

What did I do?

Starting out, this game was to satisfy the requirements for game 2 in the 20 games challenges to learn all about game development through actually doing game development. The task? create a jetpack joyride clone. 

This was going to be fun, I could barely contain my imagination going wild. How was I going to mimic gravity? what collision mechanics do I need for the obstacles? I sprinted through the setup process for this game, establishing all the basic nodes, using what I learned in game 1 but after a while I ran into the stuff I did not learn in game 1 (my Pong clone) like keeping the highest score. I researched and often referenced my game 1 scripts to figure out what to do. A fun little snag even crashed my computer when trying to implement replayability, I think I created an infinite loop of instances of the entire game as fast as the computer could create while checking if each game was live, WHILE loops are dangerous! But, there were many Aha! moments mixed in that really reminded me why I love this whole creative process, like attaching the many signals between the UI and the game being able to link it to a shop and to the animations switching from one to the other seamlessly.

Speaking of animation, I wanted to really test myself on this project and try my hand at animation, it wasn't a requirement for the challenge but I was feeling artsy. I started off simple, just pictures of the background and obstacles, having fun with the oil paints in Clip Studio Paint and I think it turned out alright (next time I hope to actually develop an art dev cycle). Then came the animation for the character which I slowly realized I was a little out of my depth. But, after working and studying over a tireless weekend, I was able to sorta figure it out and make all the animations for our Wing-Pack Joyrider thanks to the YouTuber Excal and his Discord community. You can also check that process over on my Twitch channel @ShadowedHands.

What did I learn?

Scope is a big issue, although I went beyond it a bit this time around, I still continue even after. I have to make solid judgement calls when going beyond the limit, weighing the pros and cons and now with a bit of experience I can sorta have a good gauge of knowing how much time each addition could add to production. For example, there were a few times where I said something like "It would be SO cool to add a shop! it could have like 6 items, one that could speed you up and..." I had to stop myself. Because yes those are cool and all but I don't have the time or knowledge (yet) to accomplish everything as this is a 20 game challenge not a 1 game challenge. So I said "only ONE!".  i decided on teleportation because I was in the middle of making the movement for the player. A input and simple change in the X-axis of the player and I solved having a shop item and getting something for the player to work towards.

Conclusion

This was an extremely fun game to make and I cannot wait to start on the next one! Its looking like game 3 is all about Space Invaders :) hope to see you soon! and please let me know what you think about the game!