Day 1

Hello everyone, I’m Speedy!

This post is look back at my first day of development on “Hueorph” my entry (hopefully) into Godot Wild Jam #43.

Why am I doing the jam?

Since my early teens I have wanted to create my own game but I haven’t ever made anything past playing around in the engines.

I have attempted to start a few games within the last year but I haven’t ever made it past the first few days without losing interest.

I think this is mostly because the scope of the game I wanted to make was too large and I couldn’t work out where to start.

I’m hoping the jam will help me to limit my scope because of the hard deadline and allow me to make some progress.

Day one, how it went

For me the jam started late evening on a Friday so my first day was Saturday.

With a rough idea of what I wanted to make I hopped over to Kenney.nl to get some free assets, creating my own artwork would be too much for the short length of the jam.

After acquiring some assets, I created the repository on GitHub and cloned it onto my PC.

the dreaded blank editor

Then I moved onto the dreaded blank editor! It was then that I realised that I couldn’t remember anything from the tutorials I had worked through months ago.

With my doom pending I worked on a MVP (minimum viable product) list so I could focus on only the important tasks, tackling the project in manageable chunks.

The top item on my list was ‘Player’, I started with a new KinematicBody2D, set a collision shape and added an animated sprite.

I then spent too much time trying to code elegant code but the movement was slow and the gravity didn’t work.

I rage quit…swearing never to return!

Not wanting to quit I moved onto the second item on my list ‘Level’. This is where I fell down, I couldn’t work out how to create a Tilemap, I rage quit and went about my day swearing never to return!

After resting and spending time with the family I came back with renewed determination. I found some more tutorials and it was actually quite easy to get the pesky Tilemap created.

After plopping down some tiles from my new TileSet I wanted to cover up the grey with a fancy background.

Luckily this was a snap, by setting a Camera2D as node of the player and adding a ParallaxBackground to my level a fancy background was added in minutes.

It was getting late in the day at this point and I made enough of a level to make a small progress video, so I committed and called it a day.

Success or failure

Overall I chalked ‘Day 1’ as a success, I had something rudimentary but it looked like the start of a game.

maybe, just maybe I can do this

This small victory has led me to believe that “maybe, just maybe I can do this”.

Hopefully, day 1 is a sign of things to come, small but meaningful progress with only a little bit of rage quitting.