the game is done!

i love these little devlogs after making games. they are little snippets of my thought processes during and lessons learned after making my games.

this game is very simple in gameplay, but i think the execution makes up for it. the main focuses during development really did make a difference. ill list each focus and go into depth below:

art style

flick through the games i published before this, and you'll notice how they are all very similar - pixel art everywhere. i wanted to switch things up this time with a more polygonal, sharp style and im glad i did. it fits the simple gameplay very well and im very happy with it. there are only a handful of textures, the rest being solid filled polygons. this was a fun way to approach the art, and saved alot of time changing pixels in aseprite. this brings me onto the next focus point

animation

as pixel art was out of the question for this game, it was perfect for experimenting with another feature the godot game engine provides - animation. this system is brilliant, being able to animate pretty much every single aspect of every node in the game. i used this to bring characters to life, whether it be hovering or blinking. the eyes were duplicated and made black to act as eyelids which could be moved up and down for both the ghost and the bat obstacles. i think i need to use this more often, its brilliant and has some fancy blending capabilities for smoothly moving between states.

shaders

equally as powerful in terms of making whatever the #$!* you want,  shaders can do lots of things. they are fun to experiment with, doing random maths on the uv and changing the colour values with the results is pretty interesting. doing this helped me figure out how to make the striped shader - the only way to discern which ghost you are not currently playing as. very cool stuff, knowing how to do something complex with shaders can definitely save time hand animating certain features

music

here is the big one - music. this is the first game ive properly collaborated with someone else with, and it worked out great! DJAlpha provided the music and swap sound. this saves me time either finding barely suitable open source stuff, or making my own terrible audio. combining this with adaptive music - something new for me - resulted in a pleasant and 'alive' atmosphere that my previous games did not have. collaborating is definitely scary, you worry about disputes or not meeting deadlines or misunderstandings, but i think it it well worth the risk and is practically a requirement for the games industry anyway. so yeah, do that more, me! combining talents results in brill games!

accessibility

this one is very easily overlooked when worrying about jam deadlines. most of my games have strict control schemes, and are desktop only. i wanted to deviate from this for this game! i think i did a good job doing so. the game is my first one that is fully playable on mobile and controller, which im very happy about! the extremely simple control scheme (more like button) helped make this achievable within the 3 day time scheme. going back to collaboration, testing these aspects was made alot easier with my friend MarvinPL helping me playtest. thanks marvin!

i think thats about it for this game. collaboration and exploring the capabilities of godot is definitely what brought the game to the quality level it ended up as! planning on making a fully fledged, paid game at some point because that would be awesome! but for now, thanks for reading, stay tuned for more games!

soph