Winning My First Ever Game Jam? | Godot Devlog

[Music] oh holy Jesus all right I guess it's uh it's that time of the month again the game Jam alarm is going off if that wasn't obvious okay he got to focus MZ no reason to panic here just got to clean up the workstation get rid of this goddamn garbage grab our our trusty game Jam decider this puppy here has has never let me down why are we hemmin and ha over what genre to pick when we have we have technology all the secrets of the video game industry uh clearly lie here within this uh ancient Relic it's single-handedly put Midway on the map and then and then back off the map listen I spent the patreon money on this I get to make up any lore I want all right enough stalling let's uh let's take this baby for a spin there's just no possible chance that this goes wrong and you know foreshadows like the rest of the video yeah that's about what I expected all right so this is gdau wild Jam number 64 alone in the [Music] dark this video has been brought to you by my patreon for just $5 a month you help support the channel which enables me to buy a dumb stuff like this dart board that I have no intention of ever using again but wait there's more cuz that wasn't much to begin with I also throw in all the art and all the game files from every game Jam I've ever done with my complete consent to use it all to make something interesting and cool and maybe you thought like the pumpkin should have a gun you could do that unfortunately I can't stop you I've been down bad since the dartboard investment turning this pumpkin into a war criminal you know it's a small price to pay yeah these these patreon pictures are getting significantly worse so let's just get into the video all right I I don't know what happened this Jam I was fresh off the music game where we worked in a team and part of me was a little relieved to be back on my own any crazy wacky ideas I have are fully at my disposal you know like For Better or Worse the theme gets announced uh illumination which right away I'm thinking this is a great fit for me I utilize Lighting in every game to You Know cover up the fact that I don't know how to draw most things maybe you're similar to me and your understanding of color theory is a little foggy that is to say I I went to the Wikipedia on color theory once and tried to watch an Adam C Unit video on it but then I got distracted by like three of his other videos so I never I never finished it but don't worry in gdau you just get the canvas modulate node uh you make it as dark as possible and then we make a little light and boom that's a that's color theory sort of yeah that little strategy has been carrying this channel since day one quite frankly I'm just tired of people telling me I don't do tutorials I'll do tutorial there it is Boom okay it's it's been a rough minute 30 of this video let's get into some pixel art I brainstormed on the theme for like 30 minutes guys I put in the time but unfortunately the only thing my brain came up with was the idea that you play as a wolf and the mouse controls a light you know me I'm not the greatest with planning so with very little past that I start drawing the wolf I start drawing the environment and then I add the little light I think I'm naturally more comfortable just working on visuals first I've never tried to make a project using like placeholder art my brain always wants to make things as polished as possible as soon as possible and often times to my detriment someone recently on stream actually pointed out that there's a term called horizontal slice I only ever heard of the term vertical slic uh so yeah I'm an idiot and we didn't do that here but maybe in the future when I'm smarter that that'll be something we do I will say though one benefit to starting early with the art is that while I draw I get to kind of brainstorm and figure out what the game is I decide that we have to give the wolf a sword there are so many dumb sentences that I say now because of this YouTube channel and I honestly don't know how to feel about it oh Dark Souls alert we're making Dark Souls now cuz it's the Dark Souls dog with his the Dark Souls dog sword yeah we got it it looks like SE I know actually I'm going to embrace it okay we're hacks we just copy it here we don't make anything there's no new ideas to be had they all been done it's 2023 I give him the sword and then add it to the idol and walk animations of course he's got a sword so he has to swing it so I do that animation I chop it up into two bits I have the wolf Swinging The Sword and then I also have this little slash effect when I go to put it in the game I realized pretty early on I wanted him to dash a lot of great melee combat in games has the whole character moving cuz it gives such a better sense of motion and impact and that was definitely true here also because it's a dash I'm throwing in the silhouette spawn behind the character I've done it for other games and it really helps sell the idea of quick motion it was at this point I would say that safely whatever I was doing artwise was going to work which sounds ludicrous I'm always more comfortable doing art than I am coding so why would I be so worried about that not coming together but the truth is whenever I do this perspective I only ever have the character look left and right never up and down and heaven forbid he's looking in eight directions okay smoke would be coming out my ears just thinking about that the reason why that matters so much here is cuz we're playing as a wolf any character that's elongated horizontally is going to look really bad if they're moving up and down while facing left and right but once I got it in there and working and then rotated the dash effect to the direction you're facing I think it sold the movement pretty well so no there is no eight directional movement if you're looking for that on the patreon it's not there you won't find it at least not for $5 okay we'll have to create the special uh super secret $6 tier in there we're going to have all eight directions all right guys get hyped for it listen as soon as the gdau God himself heartbeast notices us then the the $6 tier is coming and those eight directions are soon to follow okay guys any day now so from here I move on from the wolf and start focusing more on the light I add this little like a flashbang effect you click the mouse and the light quickly gets bright and then Fades back to normal to give that some early functionality add these torches in the game and when you click on them they light only being able to light them though seemed kind of liting from a game design side so I added some uh area 2D nonsense to the dash effect and now it will shut off lights and you can retap them back on okay some kind of game is coming together if you can call it that but we're definitely still pretty far from like good gameplay I take a look back at the theme page and two wild cards stand out to me white out freeze out and blood is fuel I thought it'd be interesting if there was these outdoor sections where there was snow coming down in you you could only last for so long but killing enemies kept you alive for longer I put together the outdoor snow scene and then I had these enemies that I label depression which kind of makes sense like it's the winter it's snowing out it's dark all the time I live in New England okay no one's happy around here everyone's depressed I give the wolf a health bar that depletes as long as he's in the snow and then for combat I wanted to join both elements of gameplay the light and the Wolf you stun the enemy with the light by clicking on them and then you dash through with the wolf uh it's a little on the simple side but hey it's it's a game Jam right that's good so I'm making progress we have combat but I'm starting to worry that I'm not moving fast enough things feel disjointed that's the best way I can describe it I have what feels like two distinctly different things this indoor section with torches this outdoor section with enemies but unfortunately neither section actually feels like a gameplay loop I go live on Wednesday and vent a little bit about how lost I am in this game Jam I do get good advice but it feels like I'm too far into the game Jam to just upend the gameplay and go in a weird Direction I decide The Only Way Forward is just to shove these two elements together and pray that there's some kind of gameplay Loop to be found I start with the torch section it clearly needs some reason to light the Torches so I add these doors and I give them code that says look for lights in a certain group and if those lights are all on open the door I also thought it'd be pretty interesting if we had platforms that moved when you lit them this kind of comes with all the baggage of falling off platforms and respawning but I really don't want to lean super heavily into the platformer genre instead my mind was going a little more closer to hyperlight Drifter it's starting to feel like I'm snowballing all the old mechanics from old game jams and lumping them all into this one to try to make it something I have a checkpoint system for when you die or fall off the edge I also have to add a healing mechanic cuz you're getting hurt while you're in the snow or if an enemy touches you every time I want to jump into level design I run into major setbacks cuz I have to do these level mechanics it is until Friday that I can piece together any semblance of a real level and the the game jams do on Sunday so I I'm falling apart of the seams here I'm noticing that I spent too much time on the small stuff for instance I definitely spent a couple hours working on this Parallax background with the goal being to discover whether or not that kind of works in an isometric view although it did work and I was happy about it a couple later I decide that the game could actually really benefit from a static camera so now most of that Parallax you never notice and this ends up being a reoccurring theme throughout the whole game Jam I build enemies from the ground up to have their own class and had utilize modular components so we can have different enemies but in reality we only draw this one guy and his only purpose is to keep you alive while you're in the snow as the Jam is coming to an end I would say I do about 90% of the level design in the last 24 hours which uh is not not ideal on Sunday the day the game Jam is due I end up doing a 10-hour stretch from 6:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and these are the stretches that make you never want to do a game Jam again I'm desper really jumping back and forth between level design or adding a menu doing some sound effects trying to write the tutorial SL hint system and the whole time just trusting in the process just just keep going it hopefully it'll come together I managed to get most of what I want in there I'll be at cutting a bunch of corners and at about 350 I get it uploaded and submitted to the game [Laughter] [Music] Jam you know I'm making game jams and uh learning how to code is is fun but if you're anything like me learning to code alone is actually uh pretty tricky luckily though there's help out there like the sponsor of today's video brilliant.org brilliant's got an insane amount of lessons mostly centered on math computer science and data science that's like all the stuff in school that I had the hardest time paying attention to but with brilliant everything is so visually appealing and easy to jump into that it completely broke down that barrier for me to the surprise of nobody I'm definitely a visual learner and I love that everything I'm brilliant is visual you can see exactly what's happening and why it's happening I wish more people would have warned me when I got into Game Dev how much of it is math and a lot of it can seem so daunting when you're just staring at code so I was super happy when I saw brilliant had courses on vectors and quadratics they're courses for me that have an immediate positive result on how I understand bullet trajectory and enemy travel paths and if I'm being honest some of these courses are way more fun than some of the bad game jams I've done so you guys can head to brilliant.org slz where you can get started for free for 30 days and the first 200 users get 20% off the annual plan that's brilliant.org slz all right let's get back to the video man this game Jam had so much potential I joked in the beginning but illumination really is the strong suit to most of my art style and while I was so happy with how the art came out I punted so hard by not just committing to a genre early on I wanted so badly to have both puzzle and action elements but by keeping both of them each sort of feels underdeveloped there really is only one like tricky puzzle and the most common feedback for that puzzle was I think your game is broken or my my personal favorite comment someone left when describing this puzzle they say something is clearly wrong which has hindered my experience that might be my favorite comment I've gotten on anything ever I just feel like it it perfectly sums up life really and then on the combat side of things my enemies don't even move let alone attack the outside snow mechanics themselves I think work but there just wasn't enough concept there to make me feel happy about it and it's sort of one thing to say I ran out of of time and I couldn't finish it knowing I tried my best but in actuality if I just spent like a couple extra hours planning out what I want the gameplay to be I could have got so much more done even for one of the worst game jams I think I've done this game I made called scrap Heap Summit a game that wasn't playable to the very last day that felt incredibly disjointed the whole time working on it what still Leaps and Bounds more efficient than working on this game and I really think it all comes back down to that intro when you settle on a genre whatever genre it is you end up inheriting so many design solutions that just come with that archetype often times the gameplay is even spelled out for you it's just in the name instead I was over here fumbling in the dark trying to figure out what is my game Who possibly could have guessed that wolf with sword is not a fully fleshed out genre uh me Yep this guy he he I didn't think it through this is sort of making the game sound overwhelmingly negative but in actuality it's just the development process that I think I'm bitter on the game itself is actually pretty fun I think and the feedback from other people in the game Jam has just been incredibly positive despite the rocky development process ironically enough I uh I won the game Jam which is actually super huge for me I've never won one before the closest I ever got was Sunseeker getting second place it feels like such a meaningful way to end out my first year getting into coding getting into YouTube starting game jams and now finally winning my first game jam and that kind of wraps it up so thank you guys so much for watching not just this video but all the videos on my channel do way better than I think they should and thanks to the patreons without you guys I couldn't you know waste money buying dumb props or whatever all right until next time I'll see you guys [Music] later

Channel: mz_eth

Views: 243,166

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Id: 5OCcVJBKJ1g

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024