1 Month of Game Dev in Godot

hey I'm Jay and I'm making my very first game called Soul lure I started working on this project about a month ago and I've never worked on a game before so this was really my first take on what diving into Indie Game Dev would be like and I thought it might be helpful to share my thoughts on what has this process been like for me what are some of the things that I love about it what are the things that I found uh very challenging and some things that are kind of unexpected for me let's dive in just as some background for who I am I actually work full-time as a software developer so coding wasn't something that I was afraid of I never took any Game Dev courses in college but I do have a computer science degree some of my favorite projects in those college courses were actually little mini gamess that we did to teach us programming Concepts The more I've been doing my job now it's I I wanted to try going back into those small projects and try to release something so I wanted to get my feet wet in the game Dive World really just to see what it's like to make a game from start to finish so what was this project that I came up with the idea behind Soul lure actually started out as more of just a challenge for me to make a game completely start to finish in 5 weeks asset creation programming sound design publishing all of it 5 weeks looking at it now not very feasible if I kept the scope down I probably could have done it but something happened while I was making the game I started having fun with it for the past few weeks while I've been building this out I've actually been posting Tik toks and shorts about just random Dev Vlogs and progress I've gotten some comments and feedback about people wanting to play the game and it's really encouraging and it was fun to see these ideas is Spawn from commenters and it's really motivating to try to make something better than just a challenge if that makes sense but I'm getting ahead of myself what is soul lure so I came up with this concept when I was testing out trying to make a game mechanic one of my very first shorts I made a mechanic of possessing someone with a ghost there wasn't any grand scheme behind it it was just you're a ghost you possessed someone for the for the project that I wanted to do I wanted really just to fit into two criteria I wanted it to be cozy and small that's it the whole cozy games genre is kind of sick of farming right now so I thought well what would be a fun mini game that I can include that's in a lot of cozy games fishing so I figured why not take a stab at it on implementing a small mini game with with fishing and I kept going back to that possession mechanic that I built out earlier and I thought okay well let's try making a game where you play as a fisherman on a raft and rather than using a fishing pole you send your spirit out and possess the fish to get into the raft I've never really seen that before and I thought it'd be kind of fun hence Soul lure was born I still want to keep the scope really small for it and have it be a relatively tight-knit game nothing too Grand in scale since it's my first one what started out is really a proof of concept for a game mechanic turned into a whole game with a story that I want to implement I spent the past little while drafting out ideas of a story line for the main character and the character Arc that you're going to go through while fishing with your ghost it's been fun which leads me into what I've liked about this past month being a programmer I think very analytically and logically whenever I'm presented with a problem at work you know exactly what the end goal is sure there's plenty of different ways that you can get to it but the outcome is almost always the same but that's not the case with games it's actually really liberating to have the end goal not set in stone it changes it evolves as you play around with the game engine and the characters and the concepts your game changes too and that's really strange for me it kind of brings out this really cool creative freedom combining the logic of code with the creative Liberties of Storytelling and game design in addition to that the game engine that I chose is gdau the open source community of gdau and the engine being so lightweight that really drew me to it but I've had a blast working at gdau the node system just makes sense in my head it's very easy for me to follow through with okay this is the natural grouping of this object these nodes fit together to form this scene it just it's really clicked with me so on to the challenges as much fun as I've been having it has not been an easy ride I am not artistically inclined at all and the slightest so drawing assets has been a really big struggle for me because I I like things to look nice and sometimes what I'm thinking in my head I just struggle Translating that to you know pen on paper per se so that's been a really big struggle for me and I would argue that art is probably one of the most important parts of of games it's what draws people in it's what keeps them in I hope to improve my art skills down the road but I also recognize that uh there are artists out there that are way better than me so who knows maybe down the road if I stick with Game Dev I'll be lucky enough to collaborate with some Brilliant Minds the next thing that was a really big challenge for me and that I'm still working on quite a bit is the game mechanic being fun I mentioned art as being one of the more one of the most important things I think the most important thing is the game mechanic itself if it's not fun no one's going to play it so making something that's actually entertaining is a lot harder than I realized going into it I know I know what I want to do translating it into a fun and enjoyable experience is not just plug andplay to be more specific I've been messing around that with the fish controls when the player controls a fish how that feels is crucial for how the game plays and I still haven't really found how I want it to play out I've been experimenting with a couple of things but just being frank it's not easy goes to show that the two most important things in games in my opinion um are the two hardest things for me to do which yay I haven't even touched sound design yet but that's also that's up there for one of the important ones in conclusion my monthly thoughts on my journey in Game Dev so far it's hard it's humbling it's timec consuming but also it's rewarding it's exciting and it's fun I've Loved building this game so far and I'm excited to keep going thank you so much for watching make sure to subscribe if you want to follow along while I build out Sol lure and hopefully play with some mechanics and future games down the road and if you want to know why I chose gdau as my game engine of choice check out this video right thanks everyone see you

Channel: Luciole Games

Views: 4,477

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Id: 9fAKpw7ZJko

Length: 5min 55sec (355 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2024