How I Made My First Game in 24 Hours (A Godot Devlog)

in this video i will show you how i made my first complete game in 24 total hours i created my own art created my own sound effects stole some music from youtube and quoted the whole game from scratch this game went from becoming a game jam failure to a somewhat decent first project but first i would really appreciate it if you click the subscribe button it's free and you can always unsubscribe later on i would really like to hit 100 subscribers by the end of this month so like all aspiring indie game developers i really want to complete my first game i have dabbled in game development in the past on and off but i haven't actually completed a single game yet i was just following some tutorials and making small prototypes and then quitting for a few months and i really want that cycle to stop so in order to make your first game one thing that i always hear online is that it has to be incredibly simple make it so simple that you can't fail finishing it and a good way to do that is to join a game jam a game jam if you don't know is a game making competition where you have to create a game around a certain team and a set amount of time so i looked at the available game jams on hio and eventually i found the genre mash game jam where you have to create a game which combines two incompatible genres so like farming and shooting and there's also an additional optional theme which is reusability i spent some time coming up with ideas and one thing that popped into my head was reusable rockets like the one made by spacex so the idea was to create a game where you have a rocket that's jumping between planets but you have to combine two incompatible genres so i decided on tower defense and survival so here's the plan tower defense games usually have three elements territories that must be defended and this will be the middle of the solar system i'm not sure what that will be yet maybe like a black hole or something another element is waves of incoming enemy attacks and the last element is the placement of towers and for that one i just made it so that the player will jump around pass and place towers which will shoot down the enemy that goes to the middle of the solar system as for the survival aspect of the game i made it so that the player will start out with minimal amount of resources and the player will gain more resources when enemies are killed with the towers and those resources are used to build more towers and appear as a survivor as long as possible after i got the idea of the game i watched some tutorials from youtubers like heartbeats to learn more about godot i think a dough is the perfect game engine for someone like me i'll explain more about my decision maybe later on in a future video but i didn't spend too long watching tutorials i just i think i got three episodes into heartbeats action rpg tutorial i learned all the foundations that i needed to create uh my own game and so those foundations are the interface uh scripting with gd script i learned about nodes and how to use them and how to search for help and how to look at the documentation as well as how to make stuff move and make stuff collide all of those are enough to make or figure out how to make any game that i want any simple game so first of all i made some placeholder art and illustrator and i began to create the basic movement but can i just say i had a lot of trouble learning unity and godot a few years ago and i think that was mostly because i didn't understand vectors yet i've learned a bit about it in school but back then i didn't truly understand it but now that i understand all the math behind vectors which isn't really that difficult making any movement is really really simple and i thought adding custom gravity will be really hard because i thought i had to work with those built-in physics engine which i have zero experience with in the end all i did was just subtract the position of the planet by the position of the player and that gives me the direction vector which points from the player to the planet and i just made the player basically go to that direction but i realized that using this movement it's quite difficult for the player to land on certain planets and place the towers i needed to come up with a different movement system so in the end i made it so that when the player is within a certain radius near the planet it will move relative to the planet what i mean by that is when the player presses up and down they don't go up and down relative to the world but instead they go up away from the planet and down into the planet and the way i did that was pretty simple so the y-axis is just a directional vector and now we have some pretty good movement it was pretty hard for a player to navigate around the planet so i added a mini-map by following this tutorial over here so now i have to make the planet actually move and orbit around the solar system again i thought i had to work with kudos built-in physics system but in the end i just used basic trigonometry and trigonometry actually turned out to be pretty useful for this game for example i use a sine wave to make the player and the planet move up and down the menu screen and i also use the sine wave to make the score oscillate in size when it's increasing at this point though i already have a basic game setup and i took some time to play the game and to think and that's when i realized that my initial idea of creating a tower defense game won't work because it's a sliding screen not a stationary screen and the towers will just be moving all around the world because it's attached to the planets and so creating a tower defense game in this world will be a bit chaotic and it won't actually be possible to play this game with any sense of strategy i tried to think of some workaround like making the whole game fit in one screen but but it doesn't really feel right so now i have two choices i dry scrap this project and start a new one or i continue the game and resign from the game jam the reason i started this challenge was to complete my first game the game jam was just a way to motivate me to finish it so the game jam isn't actually as important to me as finishing a game the way i see it if i start a new project then i'll be failing in my initial goal because i'll just be doing what i have been doing for the past couple of years creating a new project lose motivation start a new one and so on and so forth and that's exactly the kind of cycle that i want to stop by doing this and so i decided to continue with what i have and abandon the game jam but i needed to think of a new idea this time though the idea has to be really simple so that with the knowledge that i have now i can implement what i want in the game without getting stuck so that i don't lose motivation and to ensure that my motivation is strong i'll set it a deadline but instead of setting a specific date i just decided that i will finish the game in 24 total hours which doesn't have to be back to back it can be like four hours a day then six hours tomorrow and the point is to not make myself burn out and lose motivation i have done around six hours of work this day so now what i have to do is to come up with a new game idea i looked at what i have now and thought about the most fun aspect of the game and i thought it was really fun to just move around the world and land into the different planets and so i need to create a game which utilizes that mechanic in the end i came up with this idea so a planet is randomly chosen and a timer is set and the player wherever he is now has to land into that planet before the timer goes to zero it was a pretty simple idea and i thought i could finish the game within a few hours so i don't have to use my full 24 hours but at this point it was very late and i went to sleep i had a bit of trouble sleeping so i woke up sleep deprived but nonetheless i continued working on the game i added a timer and i made the planet flash when it is randomly chosen to be the planet to land on i did this by following this tutorial by the game endeavor which taught me a lot about cheaters and then i spent 2 hours and maybe even more to implement that into the mini-map there was a glitch or a bug which i couldn't figure out how to solve and looking back it would have been better to just stop trying to implement that since at the end of the day it wasn't really such a big deal but i finally got it working and then i made another big decision which is to make the player move relative to the world everywhere no matter how close the player is to the planet which means removing the code that i wrote out earlier which i was really proud of this is because i found it pretty hard to land into the past with the current system and so i thought it was just better to make the player just bump into the planet and the second thing i decided was to make the planet bouncy and i think this had a really big impact on the gameplay and i do feel that it's a bit more fun now that was around 4 hours of work and so i have around 10 hours left to continue working on my game the next day i got started on making the art because i have the core gameplay done and now all i need to do is just to make the game look pretty the only problem is i can't draw i am not an artist by any means but fortunately there's this really cool video by mrs is this titled how to make your game look good if you're not a good artist which is perfect for someone like me i highly recommend you watch that video but the use of it is to use basic shapes and combine them in unique ways and to find a color scheme and stick to that religiously i found a color scheme that i liked in colorhat.io which i will link in the description and i got to work in illustrator and in the end it looked a bit better than i thought but it's not perfect but at the very least it looks much better than the placeholder art so now it's my favorite part which is to make the game fun make the game juicy i added smoke particles which made the rocket actually look like a rock head i added a trail which follows the player around i had a screen shake which just made me want to bump around the planets all game i also added light which follows the player around so that the game looks less flat also i want to talk about my favorite function in the the move to word function i use it literally everywhere first of all it seems to accelerate the player but it's also used to rotate the pair to make it more smooth and i also used it in the score label so it seems as if it's increasing and i also used it to make the camera zoom more smoothly and with that i have a game which looks pretty fun to play there's only one thing left though which some argue might be the most important aspect of making your game fun which is sound i have no prior experience with doing this sort of stuff so i looked at a few videos explaining how to create sound effects and i got to work i added it to the game and then actually made the game a bit more fun there's one thing missing though which is music now this is the one thing that i have been dreading since the start of the game because i had no idea how to create music i tried watching a tutorial by a few people about how to create game music for example this tutorial by brackis by using this free software which i'm not even going to try to pronounce but i couldn't create anything which sounds good and so i decided to just link some music from youtube and the best source for that i've heard is from kevin mcloyd the song that i decided to add was called voxel revolution chat fit the feel of the game quite nicely and since i don't want to get copyright striked i added credits to the menu screen and also the description of this video after completing my menu i finally completed my first game after however many years of back and forth learning watching tutorials making small prototypes i finally completed a small and very simple but playable game and even though i failed the game jam i still accomplished my goal and by the way it ended up taking me around 18 hours to finish the game so it's 6 hours below my deadline but i'm still putting 24 hours in the title and thumbnail because it sounds better than 18. and yeah that was it a link to the hio page is in the description if you want to play the game and feedback both for the game and this video will be heavily appreciated i'm new to both this game development thing and this youtube thing so any feedback that you gave will be really really apprecia appreciated and again if you really enjoyed this video then please subscribe because that will really make me very happy and i will help you a lot

Channel: Moxly Makes Stuff

Views: 4,464

Keywords: game development, indie game dev, how to make a game, godot, godot devlog, my first game, making a game, coding a game, devlog, devlog indie game, godot game jam, game jam devlog, godot game dev, develop games, making my first game

Id: p-jManIWzAc

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021