Could I win a game jam with an engine I’ve never used?

[Music] hey Pals welcome back to a new video today I wanted to discuss the most recent ludum dare game Jam number 54 and my entry uh the results just came out a couple of hours ago and um this was my first gdau game that I ever worked on I've ever produced the first gdo project I've ever made and the game did really well so I thought we'd do like a postmortem and just talk about kind of uh how it was learning godau for this Jam and um the game itself and kind of how I went so this is the game it's called though I walk uh a bit of a Biblical reference there you are this kind of like kadava acolyte thing and um you are just making your way through some puzzle platforming levels the game is inspired by some like Dark Fantasy Tik toks that I was watching and uh basically the mechanic is that The Parallax layer informs the space that you can move around it in so the theme of The Jam was limited space and in this game you kind of uh are limited by or have the freedom to change the perspective to change the way that the actual platforming works so here uh is the kind of like Twist of the game you get given a soul and then once you have the soul you can command it around and that changes the level geometry and there are levels and areas where you know you wouldn't be otherwise able to pass through here but once you sort of send your soul out you can sort of push it into areas and then bring the platforms back and now you can sort of access areas you couldn't otherwise access this concept is one that I explore through like 10 or so levels and uh it gets kind of trippy you can kind of like move the character around while they're sort of in their soless state and then change perspective and then sort of go to another platform and do stuff like that so you can go and play it I won't spoil too much for you um the game was made in 48 hours as per the compo version of the jam and like I said this was the first game that I ever made in goodto so uh there's a lot to talk about now on the subject of like reviews and how it went the game did really well um sort of cracked the top 10 in a couple of areas in Innovation and mood and overall received the 12th Place which is uh pretty good that's up there with some of the best uh ratings that I've ever gotten in ludum Dare and I've been doing ludum D since uh 2014 so at this point I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on like making Jam games and because I am a streamer and I do have an audience I get typically a lot of reviews and that makes the review scores quite accurate because you know there's a lot of exposure I get the negative I get the positive a long time ago I used to think that maybe you know having a streaming presence would artificially inflate the review scores but I know now that is not really the case uh in April we actually entered a team version of ludum dare with a couple of friends and myself and uh our entry didn't even crack the top 100 so even though it got the second highest amount of ratings uh you get as much negative criticism as you get positive proportionate to where the game is at so since this was a good game I am happy to sort of share the story of its Creation with you now I did mention that this was the first goto game I've ever made so on Monday before the jam I downloaded GTO 4.0 uh on stream uh because obviously I have a background as a game developer and I have games that I've made it was easy to import animations this is Armen from Insignia uh and so I have that kind of back catalog of assets that I can use to just sort of prototype stuff up really quickly so the first thing I did was just like animate a Sprite you know get familiar with how time works how input works uh and then from there kind of went forward and can I make the character Run and Jump can I make them fall and land on a platform can I move with the arrow keys can I then build build my state system that I use uh in Insignia and I've built this maybe like four or five times at this point for different jams and um just in different ways and so now I'm pretty confident I can spin up a state system with uh quite a lot of Fidelity in very very little time and it was really easy and straightforward to actually learn GD script to do this GD script and C aren't actually that different given that one is visually very similar to Python and one is more like C um I found that once you get past the lack of braces and the fact that you tab to do indentation for uh Scopes a lot of the kind of you know day-to-day stuff that you're doing when building a game it's very simple logic and the structure is kind of the more important part so you know adhering to solid principles and working with modular components as opposed to inheritance tends to be one of those things gets rewarded and gdo as an engine really supports that mindset because of the way that its hierarchy is set up set up so the fact that you have to basically keep one script per node and that everything is made of nodes and a tree of nodes makes it very straightforward just understanding the difference between something being a Thing versus something having a thing and just structuring the game that way so this is actually really uh impressive and and uh really easy to get into so you know this is three four hours of using this engine and already I had something that felt more or less like it does in my in my full-time gaming Unity um you know using the assets and just moving around it felt pretty good so I was really happy with that so on the Tuesday I thought I would amp it up a little bit and try to use some of the more extended editor features uh to compare them against unities things like the tile set and tile map editor and also the timeline the sort of animator these are things that I use relatively frequently in unity and I actually have quite harsh criticisms of how they work in unity so I was interested to see how they would work in good and I hate to say it but I really didn't like Good's implementation of uh tile editing at all um unfortunately it's got very very similar limitations to the unity tile system and both of them are limited to uh how deep and how complex you can build out an auto mapping system which for the kinds of games that I make is kind of crucial that's something that good doesn't really support not in any great capacity and my second really big gripe the animator immediately struck me as really really uh early it's really not as full featured or as well thought out as I would hope given how strict and wellth thought out the component and node system is in good I was really hoping that the animated system would be as robust but it's it's really clunky and weird like for example if you want to assign a bezier to a tween at any point you have to know ahead of time that you want that track to be a beer track because otherwise you're stuck with uh cookie cutter uh mode for twinning so like a ease in out or linear you can't like just open up the dope sheet uh switch it to Curves mode and then just like take two key frames and give them a custom bezier you have to like instantiate it as a beer track first which is super weird I I mean like any any animation system Adobe Premiere or uh after effects or you know Unity system or blender pick pick an animator in any tool they all work the same way this doesn't really work that way so uh I was a little disheartened on day two like day one I thought good was amazing day two I was like oh it's still pretty early so I stand by my original thoughts on Gau being not like exactly at unity's level yet although two things that I really love about gdo are the interpreted language so the fact that you don't have to compile or even stop playback to make changes and just see them update in the editor and then um actual like building is also super fast unity's build times can be really slow especially for web based games so in a jam that's like half an hour sometimes you just lose to compiling and building whereas like uh gdau is just like super Snappy ready to go straight away so that was my first couple of days with gdau and I didn't really touch it until the G at this point you know I had imported and rebuilt my state machine system so I could animate I could make character behaviors uh obviously I know how to write scripts for coin Collectibles and um you know platforming code so at this point I've done some Parallax stuff I've done some character controller stuff I done pickups I could reuse these systems in the jam to make you know a passable game so I thought you know what this is good enough I'm going to use this for the jam and just see how far I get the only thing that I was really not happy with and concerned about was just how I would do level editing if I wasn't going to use the tile system and I didn't want to use the tile system so there was this thought in my head that maybe uh we could do some sort of something where we do levels in aprite and just import them directly I was thinking about wanting to make a game that was super super low res and how at low enough resolutions pixels are almost like tiles so you can make level geometry just out of the graphics and if I could find a way that that would be a valid approach to making the Jam game whatever it was that I was going to make that was it that's about as much purpose I had going into it uh I also did a little bit of setting up cicd so um you could deploy the game using GitHub such that as I'm committing to git it's building the game and putting it on it .io for people in my stream to play test while I'm building it that was the other thing that I was really keen on and we got set up before the jam that was it that's all the prep that I had and uh I was really excited to jump into the jam so Saturday rolled around the jam began at like 8:00 a.m. my time and I got so little sleep the night before I was really tired this morning I wasn't sure how I was going to do with the jam uh and I jumped into figma I have this document that I set up which is kind of like a ludum dare Jam planning Doc it's kind of like all of the hours spread out and then you can just paste images and stuff just to get inspiration so i' had been looking at these Tik toks that were like Dark Fantasy and I wanted to make a game that made me feel like how I felt watching these Tik toks and you can see here kind of what my plan looks like basically I I I have time where I sort of block in for sleep and I have different sort of cards that I lay in almost kban style it's not really kban it's not like Trello it's more just like a Time line with a schedule in it and then as I work I Chang those things from plans to like actual things that I did just diing what it was that I did over that period of time so the theme was limited space I was really happy because there was a concept that I had way back on like Wednesday I was just like taking a shower and I was like what about a game given that I only know how to do like parallaxing and platforming what if I kind of like make a game out of those two things and it it sort of brewed in my mind over the next couple days and I didn't want to like think about the idea too much in case it didn't fit with the theme but the theme really fit with it so I was like that let's do it I know what I'm going to do I'm going to do like a platforming game where the foreground is colliders so that was it that was like I knew what I wanted to make I didn't need to think any harder than that I try to set standards when I do a jam like just little targets that I want to reach and one of those is that I want to have a game that's playable within the first few hours and completable in the first day that's like super ambitious and never happens but it does kind of Orient me in a way that I can kind of like try at least to get the game play in and playable as early as possible to leave space for me to polish and pivot and do whatever I need to if you spend too long on assets and polish too early and you need to Pivot you don't have enough time um so this is like a nice way to structure it so here as me just like dumping in some prototype graphics and trying to get something working right just get that Parallax in and then have that Parallax be controlled by a game object in the scene rather than the player's position I mentioned that I wanted to do Sprites as Collision layers and I knew that gdau had this feature up here in the top where you can take a Sprite and give it a collider based on the sprite's opacity that's all you had to do but I needed this to be uh like more script based rather than having to click on the actual editor every time and set it up cuz it's kind of like a little dialogue box you have to go through and some window uh management it's a little wizard you have to go through to click through some stuff and I thought to myself if I'm going to be making lots of quick modifications to this system I can't be going into this thing every single time I want to re-update the geometry so uh with the help of someone in chat we wrote like a really quick script that would basically take that function in the editor and then move it to a little Boolean where I just had to click a little check boox in the top left and it would just like run that script at the settings that I would otherwise be manually having to enter every time uh here is like the first you know test of this thing working I just mapped The Parallax to the mouse position so I could click and just make the Parallax react to that position and um very quickly I figured out that I could have maybe different Parallax scales on different levels and that would help the level design and I was really concerned about the level design being difficult as hell because if things are moving how do you design where they're going to be at different parts in the level right like if a foreground layer is positioned such that like one of the parts of the foreground becomes a a platform you can jump on AC cross a gap if you move a bunch how do you design some other component that will also come into play later on based on the player traveling some amount it sounds really complicated and it it kind of is but with a game this simple I thought I could get away with just sort of like eyeballing it and then changing it and updating it and seeing if it worked and with that script that we wrote meant that I could make quick iterations to the level design and that would be straightforward enough so like the foundational kind of like unit of level design was this one idea where there's a gap that you can't jump over and when The Parallax is just right it forms a bridge that you can walk across that was like the one idea that I started with that I felt like from there I could build the rest the game out so that was kind of what I put in and you can see here I'm just sort of toggling back and forth so this is kind of like what it looked like uh in the first few hours so I started at 8:00 and uh I worked until 4:00 p.m. and you can see like the first 8 hours is mostly full of just engineering tasks um so you know switching the engine to good4 building the scene building out Parallax stuff building the game manager so being able to switch between scenes the ad of kill zones and like handling what happens if like The Parallax and the normal geometry close in around you so like crushing you how I like reset the game and then some level design that was basically it I did like a couple of levels and then passed out for like 4 hours this is what happens when you don't get a lot of sleep the night before uh I basically just called it at like 400 p.m. I was like I'll be back later and just slept for like 3 hours and then had had a shower had some dinner and something happens when you sleep you know like the the brain like does some weird refactoring and like figures out stuff so I had this like creative creative like jolt where I was thinking okay what if the player controls this extra thing and what if it's like the difference between like your body and your soul and so the Parallax is controlled by wherever the soul is and sometimes that's in your body but sometimes you can move that around um I had that idea like yeah in the ninth you know at 900 p.m. 12 hours into the jam so I basically spent the rest of the night kind of building that and trying to get the game at least to a point where all the systems were in so the second day I started with art and this turned out to be a really interesting event um this is one of those things where if you're making a really low reses game the way you use color tends to be really pivotal and in this case because I wanted to go really like low th low bit I only had two colors for the foreground and the middle ground so there's like a gray black and then like a blue black or like a two two shades of of of black basically uh and I wanted the player to feel like they were naturally between those two layers um without having to do any weird fancy layer sorting stuff I just wanted it to feel like the player lived in the space between those two layers so at first I I sort of just tried something that was relatively high contrast I knew I wanted to use some white in the character to make them more focal because that's the thing that you're looking at and uh I knew that I wanted them to be this kind of like acolyte ritualistic sort of thing I don't know um so I started trying to use gold and um different colors I explored different forms and shapes even like feminine versus masculine shapes also things like how I would identify where their soul was so at first I had like a candle like oh maybe the soul is the candle and then maybe the soul is like a candle that's actually a dagger like I love this idea of giving protagonists swords so I was thinking like okay maybe like the Candlestick can be kind of like a dagger this is like a Castlevania is thing that I just like so like all good developers you know I was really diligent and I tried to put the character in the game as early as possible just to like really see it in context and it it felt weird it felt way too bright so I started darkening the character down just to see if I could make it fit more in the world and a weird thing happened when that darkest Shadow color overlapped with the actual foreground it really felt like the character lived in that space so I was thinking to myself how can I maximize this feeling of like placing the character in the level by using the exact same colors and in the end I I ended up sort of like taking away some of the detail that I'd added with the lighting and the shadow and just making it darker and you can see here it kind of works way better now having the character just like be in the scene using just those two colors that I used for the foreground and the mid-ground as the characters cloaks colors right so not even trying to differentiate them in terms of their actual silhouette um but only just in the face and the hands so once I was happy I started doing um my animation process which is very much uh Straight Ahead animation where I'll just take blobs and I'll animate the blobs and just see if I can get the thing feeling like how I want I'll animate one limb at a time you know the chest the head the hands and then flatten them down uh or just otherwise replace the colors with the real colors uh this is a great way of getting the feel and the rhythm of the animation down um really early so again always prototyping in the engine and seeing how it feels um I was pretty happy with like the basic sort of flow very early like it was you know behaving the way that I would expect it to um but but I do think about things like the span of the feet so how far apart are the character's legs does it look like they're covering the amount of ground they should um if I make it feel like it's synced up how fast does that make them move like does it work if I make them take bigger strides or shorter strides for the actual level design and you can see here I actually had that mechanic working pretty well with the soul coming in and out of the body then I went ahead and did a jump animation so just skipping ahead and just thinking about riseing middle and then falling uh that's kind of a classic way of doing jumps in games and what I like to do is just map the character's velocity to the frames so when their velocity is positive I they're they're moving upwards and when their velocity is negative they're moving downwards so you can just lur between the minimum and maximum speeds uh through the animation frames so that's what I did and over time i' gave the character like more frames but what's great about that approach is that you don't it doesn't matter how many frames there are you could just do it the way you want and it'll map it correctly here's how it was looking this is like uh maybe 3 hours in so I had you know some good motion I had you know Rising falling you could jump you could run and it was feeling pretty good I also added a little KNE to sort of respect the states I was trying to think about how we would represent the visual difference between controlling the character versus controlling the soul and I thought the idea of having the character Neil um sort of making them stationary while the Soul's moving around would make that feel a little bit more intuitive without adding like too much UI to you know illustrate who's being controlled um I wanted to keep the game Vibe as strong as possible so I really didn't want to Overlay or overburden too much you know instruction or UI into the game just keep it like nice and subtle and the kind of like piesta resistance of that like the the real like cream of that like uh mentality came with the idea that we would make the face change color from white to black when the character is um with or without the soul and we decided to do that with a Shader so I never used shaders in gdau cuz I never use gdau but um this was actually way way easier to set up than I thought it would be this was like super simple I would never used this Shader language but um it was like so intuitive so basically what I did was I just gave the character like a full red face and then depending on the state that they were in I would recolor the face to be white or black so when the soul left the body the body's face goes black when the soul comes back in the face goes white and I wouldn't have to then do two sets of animations I just do a color replace Shader U it was super super easy and um within like I don't know 25 minutes it was like working exactly how I would want it to so I was really happy with this and and on a level of Polish I really feel like it's a subtle but very effective thing that maybe goes unnoticed but um I think it really helps to explain the game to the player in a way that doesn't involve more UI one thing that was a little difficult which needed a little more solving later on was communicating the state of like which of the two the player is controlling so the soul being out versus in is a different set of toggles to the player being in control versus the soul being in control for me do the puzzles that I wanted to do I needed it to be modal like that one or the other not both at the same time so here like having the player be in control versus the soul be in control is not visually obvious and we needed to add a little bit more later but that was kind of like a compromise I had to make would have liked to have had it all be really seamless without modes but unfortunately uh with 48 Hours you don't always get to make the game you want to make without compromise so then it was time to do level design and here I actually orted one of my little like workflow ideas from my most recent couple of years in Insignia where I literally just take the puzzles that I want to design and design the levels around them and here they're just thumbnails they're just little sketches of little design ideas that I've got based on the mechanics so rather than designing spaces and then thinking about how you can work puzzles in you start with the puzzles and then you build the levels out from there and I'm just doing this in figma I'm literally just making boxes and rectangles and stuff and I'm copying and pasting to create the templates for the levels you know once I had an idea it's like okay I can use a foreground element as an elevator um you know what if I want to make the player go up or what if the thing is in the way of the player and the player has to move the Parallax to move it out of the way Suddenly It's like you got three four five level design ideas in like 30 seconds and I can show you what that looked like kind of in the end 20 minutes maybe half an hour to put together essentially the whole layout of the game I even had levels that I didn't make just because I had so many ideas that I couldn't fit them all into the game so I got to pick the best 10 and put them in and so as I was implementing these I was kind of going on and and thinking about how I would do the backgrounds and just the general sense of Polish in the game um you know just setting up the level creating a structure do we have colors that flow so that as you get deeper into the game it becomes more red from Green you know just little trying to create some little ideas and motifs and thinking about how we can create those spaces at one point and this is probably what I would call the first GTO style hitch that I ran into that uh really really slowed me down in a way that I didn't expect it to is just the level transition wipe I just had like a a a Sprite that I wanted to swipe in front of the screen to hide the level loading and um this thing using the gdau animator took me so much longer like an hour and a half like it took me longer to implement this thing than to design all of the levels in the game um just because I couldn't figure out how the animator Works in GTO in terms of the saving and overwriting so what it would do is you know I'd be working and I'm habitually hitting contrl s to save my work but that changes the defaults so like the actual serialized positions of the objects will save to the current timeline position if you save while you're dragging left and right so like if your like timeline is on like frame five out of 10 and you hit save that's the position it'll save at in the scene permanently and this was driving me crazy so then you need like reset animations which which become the defaults like on scene load they'll load as they'll load the reset versions it's not a great model I hate the unity timeline but at least it does a better job of managing the serialization than gdos and um look eventually I worked it out but it was it was a a real it was a real stumbling block whenever I'm working in a jam I always have this idea of like the moment as in like the the thing where if you're going to explain the game to somebody you explain it based on your memories of this thing that happens and in this case it's like the Seance when you uh are given the soul so I wanted to create a nice elaborate level with a bit of a cut scene to sort of like be the the the moment where the game's mechanics all sort of start to make sense this was really fun to design really easy to design because I love working in Ace Sprite and um it came together pretty quickly so this is me kind of like prototyping it out and I had this idea of like these people uh sort of coming in from the from the windows and um yeah like offering you a soul so I think by this point we're at like 700 p.m. on the Sunday uh which means we've just got that night and the morning to submit at 9:00 a.m. I was starting to think about doing the cut scene and also some music and sound effects those were like really important as well as like some extra bits and pieces that I hadn't solved so like resetting the game or returning to title uh any kind of like Collectibles uh and just kind of like creating a nice like finished Loop uh cuz at this point you still couldn't get to like a credits screen or like an ending and I didn't have like a title screen either so at this point I'm getting close but I really wanted to get that that flow of like on boarding the game um in you know a jam to me is really a proof of concept of an idea and an idea is only as good as your ability to explain it to the player and if the player can understand what it is that you're trying to do with a game in the scope of like 2 or 3 minutes that's kind of like the mission of a Jam game right that's like the goal as if like you can kind of like make the player feel like this could be a whole game to me a lot of that is the tutorial or a better way to put it is the whole game is really a tutorial for something bigger and the more fluid and seamless you can make the tutorial the kind of better I think the game will fa in the jam I think people resonate with that so this ends the cruy easy part of the jam and now we get into the nauy late stage so it's now like pretty late in the jam and I'm starting to play with the idea of doing music and sounds and I jump into FL Studio I can give you a listen of what that sounds like uh this is me trying to like synthesize out the uh that weird soundtrack to those Tik Tock uh fantasy things that I wanted to create um they've got this like really weird eerie sort of like 8bit thing that they play against them so I thought I'd like try to recreate that first and then make my own original song okay this is what it sounds like it does have a little bit of sustain the thing is with music and me it's super HIIT and Miss I usually take like a day to get comfortable with FL Studio again because it's like months to a year between times of me opening this software and sometimes I get really comfortable and make really cool stuff and sometimes like in a jam context it's like total dice roll as to whether or not I'll be able to run into something that works and here honestly as sometimes happens I get like an hour in and I get something it'll usually be like a title theme like a like a 30C thing and then it's like I'm outtie long term like what I'd like to be able to do is establish like in a jam context a title theme and then a theme that plays at the end of like a level or a space and then like an ending if I can get like three tracks in in like 2 hours I feel like that's good going but I never seem to be able to make enough space to get familiar maybe I should be spending time prepping an FL Studio project before the gam so that I know which instruments I might want to use and like just remembering how to use the software that's probably the right way to do it so once the sound effects for stepping were in and the music was in I started trying to really solve the interaction between the soul and the player from a visual standpoint so I was talking about how we had the face and um that was all fine but then I ended up having like a mini version of the Soul as like a pointer to show you like who you were controlling so the soul is sort of out there and then if you control the body while the soul is out uh you see like a tiny little flame that follows the player around and um that was my compromise um so one just goes a little darker than the other and that's sort of the way that you know which one you're controlling at any one time uh I managed to like really explore a lot of like level designs that I wanted and like I got them all in with pretty much ease there was one little mechanic that I actually got some negative feedback on um which was that a lot of players expected the character to stick to the platform that the character was sitting on as you transition you can see the character sort of shifts a little bit um that wasn't like necessarily a design Choice it was just like the default way that good managed to handle rather than trying to solve it myself I just went you know what I'll just design around this and and I ended up adding like little like edges little like wedge bits um so that the player gets like stuck in the bucket of the platform you can see them here um just those little things there trap the player so they don't slide off oh God yeah this I my eye started to get really bloodshot what happened was like I've got this lamp next to me and I've been streaming for like 9 hours and the light from the lamp was just like causing a strain on like one eye I feel really bad about it now but uh you know it is what it is I'll just be mindful in future to have like another you know box light here to sort of like provide a bit more balance or something like that so at this point the game is coming along really well I've got like all my levels I've got my animations in got my art in it's really just this like pivot pivotal cut scene moment that I want that like core mechanic unlock moment which I really want to get right and so I start using G animator and I start trying to time out this thing to build a little cut scene now this was coming along pretty well but at some point along the way all I was trying to do was make it so that the camera stopped following the player and started following the sole object so I was just changing one variable in a property of a script uh in the animator that was the only thing I was trying to do and somehow this was crashing all of gdau like my entire project would become corrupted every single time I tried to change this one thing and I couldn't understand why it was happening this went on this this crashing issue went on for like hours of me going what the hell is happening my project is broken I don't know if we're going to be able to submit this game it started with the animator and the more I tried to fix it the more other things started crashing the game like we started to figure out that my doors were crashing the game because there was like a circular referencing between the doors like if you use uh Pac toine node object as the pointer for the doors and the doors point to each other then the game will try to circularly load all of the levels perpetually at once when you when you load the game this didn't happen until I closed that Loop until the I made the last level load into the first level just in the editor it would just crash the entire project and like make it unopenable and then like later on like another crash where like uh the chales my like pickups in the game were crashing the game because the script on the Chalice was trying to run after the Chalice had been destroyed somehow like just the most like weird unintuitive problems that were just like popping out of out of nowhere that I hadn't experienced up until like this is like the 11 the literal 11th Hour like this is like 3 4 hours before the thing is due to submit and I'm like pulling my hair out going like I'm not awake enough to solve this problem and eventually we we did uh like finally we got the thing going and um managed to work out all of the sort of intricacies of you know taking control away from the player while the cut scene was out was operating and then also stepping the player through the use of the Soul and the inputs in between the cut scene so like the game tells you to do one thing and then you press the button and it tells you to do another thing you press the next button and then it lets you go so it was kind of like unbelievable to me how long it took to get from like 99% done to 100% done that last percent of this game took like 4 hours it was in it was what happens when you use a new engine basically to make a game so thankfully I did finish and we gave the game a name I was thinking like Yay though I walk paraliminal there were a few ideas inspector the idea of like par like Paranormal and like paralax that was kind of something we were playing with ples of existence versus like visual planes we were sort of playing with that as well but I went with though I walk in the end cuz I like the biblical connotation of like walking between life and death and yeah like got a title in there put the title at the start of the screen I kind of like when games don't have a title screen they just like drop you in so I tried to do like a hybrid start screen title screen um got my music in and that was it submitted the thing and she was done so in the end this was a gam that I was mostly pretty proud of in terms of like how I scoped my time and how I worked on the game obviously you can always do better right the idea of like boxing my time better to make a game that I can play test more and pivot if I need to is something that you know I think I've never done better than this sometimes you have to sort of accept that you can't control every aspect of the game and there was maybe one or two core ideas about this game that I identified as kind of like imperfect but that were imperfect in the concept like conceptually at its foundation this game had an issue which is that if you split out the player position and some other object as the two things that control the Parallax of the game so where you move versus where you look if those things are separate and do you want the control scheme to be simple the simplest thing you can do is have a toggle which is what I implemented but maybe there would have been a world where uh mouse and keyboard alternating between like having Mouse control the soul and keyboard control of the character could have been interesting I just don't think that there would have been a nice way to to control the difficulty curve without the toggle but I know that the toggle creates a kind of slowing down of the game play it kind of forces you out of the flow to swap between two things and that's just a limitation of this core design of what the game is I kind of felt straight away that like I think I did the the concept Justice I think what I made is like a cohesive whole thing and I feel like I did a good job of it but I wasn't I I didn't really feel like I could make this game into like a bigger game as sometimes I feel um and I didn't think that it was necessarily going to like win the jam or anything but I am really pleased with how we went I mean like 12th is a really really good result um and you know the feedback that I got was very positive like a lot of comments a lot of them said um that they really enjoyed the concept that they felt that it was novel and that they never really thought of the idea before Parallax is is a very popular mechanic in in video games and the idea of having The Parallax be a platform is something that I haven't really played with before um it's a little bit there in Fez um being able to switch perspective and walk across the perspective switching areas um but in a 2d game like this not super duper something I'd seen before especially in a jam I felt like yeah being able to do something as full as this that felt Innovative and you know when I look at the score for Innovation you can see that people thought it was Innovative as my first goto game using the two things that I had that I knew how to do Parallax and character controls um I'm really proud with this result um so something that I you know try to use to gauge where I'm at as a developer and um I feel like this is kind of like it's a bit of a confidence boost to know that you can sort of like jump into something and make something that's artistic basically whole um in 48 hours in an engine you don't know and it also was a really good taste test for using godau uh I feel like I will use gdau in future for game jams like I I think that it proved itself enough especially in how fast it is to compile and iterate um those are just things that I really think lend themselves to game jams and smaller games of course as a Unity developer uh I still will be using Unity of course for Insignia but what this did lead to was uh me downloading hot reload for Unity hot reload is a Unity extension that I've found really really valuable in the last little while I constantly struggle with having to recompile my game to do simple things like debugs in unity but hot reload allows you to pretty much just skip all that and it will selectively recompile parts of the code to update live and so since using gdau it's something that I like I couldn't live without and I've been using hot reload in unity uh which has been really helpful when developing Insignia so in terms of like using gdau in future I will definitely be using it for jams and I would like to be able to use it for bigger projects I know that it's something that I could do and I'm sort of looking forward to seeing it grow to a point where a lot of those uh little gripes that I had are ironed away I'd also be kind of interested in actually like providing feedback to the team on how I would make these things work better as a ux designer it's kind of like a job that I've done professionally before building you know interfaces for people so um it's something that I'm yeah like maybe I don't know I could do a video breaking down how I would build the animator or the tile map system um I don't know so there you go that's how I made a top scoring ludum dare entry in my first week of using gdau and I hope you enjoyed this video stay tuned for more updates on Insignia I've got another one coming really soon and uh yeah that's it thanks for watching as always I've been Adam you've been the pixel Pals until next time hey pal thanks for watching and thanks most especially to the patrons and twitch Subs who support this Channel and my Game Dev project Insignia to find out more click the links in the description below and uh if you like this video tell YouTube by clicking the like button and then YouTube will tell me and then I'll make more videos that's nice thanks again and until next time

Channel: AdamCYounis

Views: 98,703

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream, game jam, learning, competition, contest, hackathon, godot, unity

Id: 9HMIbGLLrSk

Length: 43min 1sec (2581 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023