• Projects

  • My First Godot Game - 2D Platformer!

These last couple of weeks (entire month, really) have been killer at work and I’ve barely had time to work on the game, although any time I have had has been devoted to bug hunting and tidying things up.

That is no fun. Hopefully your work will settled a bit so you have more time to work on the game and/or relax.

I am hoping that this weekend I can get quite a bit done, I just implemented spikes tonight and plan to implement some more actions the player can do - hopefully I can have a video of it out soon!

Cool! I’m looking forward to see what is in store :smile:

4 days later

I have to put this project on the backburner right now. Long story short, my mother is not doing well and probably has less than a month to live, I just don't have the time or energy to focus on this project right now.

I do plan to return to it in the future, but I will also rewrite a bunch of the code now that I have a better understanding of how Godot works. 3.1 should have a bunch of features that will ease the process of rewriting so I'm looking forward to that.

But for now, I have to put this on hold and spend as much time with my family as possible. We all knew my mom was battling her cancer and that eventually it would turn, but we didn't expect it to be this quick. That's how it goes, I guess.

Sorry to hear that, it can be tough when you are losing a loved one to something you have little to no control over barring some breakthrough or miracle. Both my grandparents died 8 days apart last Summer, there are still many things that modern medicine can't fix.

It's okay to take a break for this, take advantage of any opportunity to see your mother one more time and set aside a period to mourn when she does pass.

Not sure what I can say in this situation but hope that you can have as much time with your family as possible and don't forget to take care of yourself as well.

edit: spelling. :sweat:

As the others have said: Take as much time as you need and take care of yourself!

5 days later

Thanks for the well wishes everyone, my mother is incredibly stubborn and just won't go down without a fight. I've been visiting every night for the last week and while she is asleep most of the time, when she is awake she's extremely alert and surprisingly active. Of course I realize that won't keep up, but it's nice to see she can still have extremely strong and good days. I am appreciating it while it lasts.

In other news for my project, I spent the last couple of days refreshing my computer by reinstalling Windows 10 and dual-booting Manjaro linux alongside it, as I want to primarily develop my game in linux (yet another reason I love Godot!). I did attempt to import my project (after making backups of course), but something odd happened and I had to fix every single dependency for my scenes. It took quite a while, and afterwards I realized just how horribly my project is organized!

So, I think what I am going to do is take what I have learned from this, and start from scratch, as that will allow me to keep things extremely tidy and significantly reduce the workload on myself in the future. I am also debating if I want to move this project back to 3D, as a first-person view game, since I think that would be extremely interesting and solve a lot of issues I'm having with 2D by completely forgetting about it! It would still be a platformer, but first-person and have many of the exact same elements. I just think it would play better in 3D. What do you guys think?

@BinaryOrange said: Thanks for the well wishes everyone, my mother is incredibly stubborn and just won't go down without a fight. I've been visiting every night for the last week and while she is asleep most of the time, when she is awake she's extremely alert and surprisingly active. Of course I realize that won't keep up, but it's nice to see she can still have extremely strong and good days. I am appreciating it while it lasts.

That is good to hear! :smile:

So, I think what I am going to do is take what I have learned from this, and start from scratch, as that will allow me to keep things extremely tidy and significantly reduce the workload on myself in the future. I am also debating if I want to move this project back to 3D, as a first-person view game, since I think that would be extremely interesting and solve a lot of issues I'm having with 2D by completely forgetting about it! It would still be a platformer, but first-person and have many of the exact same elements. I just think it would play better in 3D. What do you guys think?

From what I have seen and read, I think it would be interesting regardless of whether it is 2D or 3D. If 3D solves issues and is more interesting/fun, then I'd go for making the game 3D! You know your game the best, so I would follow your gut and do what you think is best!

2 months later

UPDATE

I have not worked on this game at all since mid August, and as mentioned previously I somehow butchered the project when backing it up and broke every dependency, in every scene, in every folder. Blegh.

But, I have been working on some concepts which I hope to start working on in Godot soon, and I shouldn't need to wait until Godot 3.1 to do it!

I am planning to keep the game 2D after all, but I will switch between perspectives to solve some of the issues I knew I would be running into if I kept it as a sidescroller. What I am thinking is to have a top-down view for most of the game play, and switch to sidescrolling maps when the game requires it for the game play. Boss battles will also primarily be in the top-down perspective, unless sidescrolling would suit that particular boss better.

I also have the beginnings of a story, and I now know exactly what the player's main mechanics will be.

I have given myself a month to come up with a basic test level with basic graphics to showcase what I mean. It will show the differences in the level designs and also how the player will be handled. Wish me luck!

Sounds cool!

@BinaryOrange said: I have given myself a month to come up with a basic test level with basic graphics to showcase what I mean. It will show the differences in the level designs and also how the player will be handled. Wish me luck!

Best of luck :smile: