Uh, I can actually do this!!!

I only have a little experience with making games. Long ago, I used StarCraft's map editor to make my own take on one of the common USM game styles. And (also long ago, just less) I tried to make a platformer in Scratch (I was actually trying to simulate some physics, not really make a game). The StarCraft game creation was really satisfying; I got to take my annoyances with a genre and tweak them out; the gameplay was significantly improved vs the more common maps in the same style. Scratch was a giant pain to deal with; it was very difficult to organize the code and even more difficult to debug.

I had an idea for a game that was compelling enough to try and make it happen, so I'm starting out by learning a game engine and creating a few simpler games. I started with UnrealEngine 5 because I'm amazed by the demos. I also like the blueprints because I think my kid might be able to use that easier than writing code. Alas, it just doesn't work on my laptop; the scene editor rendering fails spectacularly, making it unusable. I started looking at other engines; MonoGame and Godot seemed promising. I started with MonoGame, but it doesn't appear to have anything like a scene editor; it seems like everything is done in a code editor. This isn't how I wanted to work (at least not for now), and I'm sure it won't be as fun for my kid, either. Then I spent a couple days learning some of GodotEngine. I'm gobsmacked at how easy it was to make something functional! Like within a few hours, I figured out how to make animated sprites, make a player that responds to controls, interacts with other objects, and reacts to gravity. I learned how to use tilemaps for the first time, including defining collision shapes on the tiles. I learned to make a camera and also came up with a "creative" way to respawn my character when it dies (now I just reset the scene). I added jump cancelling because it was irritating not to be able to control the jump height. That's where the first prototype ended and I felt like I accomplished a lot to make something that actually kinda functioned and I could tweak the gravity, jump height, character size, etc and got a quite satisfying game feel (at least to me).

Then came day 2! The artwork I chose initially didn't mesh well together; I wanted either to make my own crappy (but coherent) art or find something better; I came across kenney.nl and loved the look of that, so I swapped everything out. That made a big difference on how satisfying this was to play with. Then I added an enemy, figured out how to make it walk, kill, and get killed. Stomping on the enemy was kinda unsatisfying until I added a little bounce. Then I wanted to also make a boost if you use the enemy as a jump platform. Then it struck me that I could use that little added mechanic to make a little puzzle/challenge - you need to jump to an unreachable platform to reach the goal. Then I decided to also figure out how to make a door that unlocks with a key; I placed the key high on the platform, figured out how to make the player carry it and how to make that key unlock the door. There needed to be some way to "know" you won the level when you reached the goal, so I added victory music and fireworks (a particle emitter). It took several tries for me to beat the level and it was incredibly satisfying when I finally got that victory music & fireworks show.

I'm amazed by how easy this is; at how how quickly I could think of a mechanic I wanted to add, then be able to figure it out without much fuss. This is really motivating. I'm going to tinker with adding more mechanics with the goal of just getting used to working with Godot, getting a feel for how to organize my code and assets, and maybe automate some of my publishing workflow. The next few things I want to try are animated water, a HUD, points, inventory, health/damage, projectiles, wall slide & jump, Spiderman (or Kunai) style swinging, an overworld map.