Surviving the week

My takeaway from the last jam was “don’t spend all your time on art and polish, make the game first.” So, naturally, I spent all my time on art and polish and left the game part for the end. I wasn’t trying anything particularly groundbreaking gameplay wise, I knew what I was making was going to be fun, so I didn’t feel like early prototypes were worth the effort. And as a hot take, art and UI polish and animations are gameplay. Really. An attack that gives you no feedback is less fun than one that causes a fun bouncy animation to happen, particles to spill out, and sounds to play. Navigating menus, wanting to pause, wanting to rebind your controls - these are all things that are a tangible part of the game too. I did make use of an asset for this https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/2899 but honestly almost wish I hadn’t. It’s set up as a series of inherited scenes and does stuff behind the scenes with loading that I couldn’t figure out. Eventually got it all wrangled up, but it ended up taking a lot of time and I suspect making the menus from scratch would’ve ended up faster.

The other big time sink for me that set me back a day was exporting my art at too high a quality? I decided to play around with SpriteMancer, after long being curious about CodeManu’s tools. I like it, but dang, a decent sized thing like the word “Campfire” on the menu screen at a decent resolution and framerate, doing an animation with a long enough cycle to not seem obviously repetitive (5 seconds) ends up a whopping 25 MB 18054x7310 pixel behemoth of a spritesheet.

I was thinking “ah, these are just 2d assets, Godot can handle them, i want super higher quality”

and then had to redo everything because the game was lagging with just a few enemies. My terrible workflow left little room for mistakes, and I continually underestimated how long things would take (as one does) so stuff I thought I could squeeze in at the end I was unable to. I had several different weapons planned, some even mostly programmed in, same with enemies, more meta-progress stuff, etc.. I had started writing a song, but ran out of time to finish it. Alas, that’s how it goes sometimes.

My buddies who didn’t make it in in time, meet Floaty and Stretchy:

I also had a new sound effect process I really wanted to use, but couldn’t! So I made a video tutorial about how I went about making the few sounds I did use: