Introduction

Project Details: Briefly Pico8, mostly Godot 3 but moving to Godot 4. Platformer. Mostly a way to teach myself godot and game development, but I do hope to release it someday. Initially used a pixel artstyle, but I've considered moving to something more natural to me.

These were first posted to my tumblr blog. I've more or less preserved the original contents, but I've reformatted things and removed bits and pieces that fit better in the inital context.

1/16/2022

little character ive been developing for a game idea

Sprites are all in Pico8 which is why they look like that. I can only have 16 predetermined colors, so I work with what I have. I did the sprites before the main design but I kinda had it in my head a little bit. The sleeping cap feels so silly and out of character but when you're working with 8x8 sprites you do what you can to make it more interesting. This seemed like the best thing.

yippee!!!! wahoo!!! i understand now

The spikes do have hitboxes and you can die, but the game over screen is embarrassingly awful. Most of the time I spent working on this went into figuring out how to make the player die/able to hit spikes.

However, there is no save system/check points so if you die....you start over, which doesn't matter since this level was just me throwing random stuff together and is also the only level and also has no win condition. I'll have to get a more solid idea put together and then tackle that.

unrestrained summer fun

I think for everything to come together, I need a main hub... That's gonna be a little difficult with placeholder graphics. I've done some planning but not a whole lot, but I have an idea for the general flow of the game.

I’ve temporarily halted work on the platformer idea so here’s the song that I made for it that was heard in the little demo video I posted a while back.

back in the lab again

I ran into the stupidest issue trying to get this to work and spent HOURS last night trying to fix it, but all the code looked right. And it took five seconds once I realized my mistake...

Well, it works now! I don't know much about level design and I want to play with the movement physics more, so I can't do that anyways. So, I'm just going to work on the systems I want to implement. At least this moment.

yippee!!!

I don't want to post every little thing I do for this, but I thought it was funny. Especially since the character is like...very... what's the word? Deadpan is a good descriptor but not quite the word I want.

Playing with positional audio. Not much to show, and the first part of the video got cut out for some reason.

My next goal is to create enemies. I've considered changing the art style away from pixel art since it's not my strong suit, but I'll have to remake the movement system, but that will take a lot of time and adjustment to make work. Was hoping to also showcase a dialog system I started working on the other day, but I don't have a good grasp of what I'm doing so I think I'll return to it later so I know what I'm doing when I follow the tutorial.

1/11/2023

I guess you could call this concept art. Maybe I will make a cleaner version of it another day but sometimes you just gotta get the idea out there.

3/5/2023

Finally finished the full ref sheet for the player character in the platformer I'm trying to make.

Wanted to make a balloon object but ran into a roadblock so I just made it so I could kick it around instead and realized just how messy my code is. Anyways balloons can unlock and open doors

I think I understand why it does this at least, because both the player character and balloon are considered a "body". The footage didn't record right so it missed a part where the balloon can actually pick up the key to unlock that door--which does not allow the balloon to unlock the door, BTW. It just softlocks you. However, when the player picks up the key they would usually have to enter the area to unlock the door. However! Because the balloon is also considered a body, if the balloon is in that area, you can still unlock the door.

I've been meaning to fix everything but before I do that I might update the sprites and do something less pixelly (which will make all the movement stuff mess up since the dimensions will be bigger... Anything to avoid level design LOL

5/27/2023

Placeholder sprites for the game I am “working” on

These are rough around the edges but I think this style would work good. Small and simple enough to be easy to play as. Until I start reworking and actually start doing stuff, I think I'll keep coding with the little pixel guy. I've grown attached to the placeholder pixel graphics so if this porject ever goes anywhere, maybe it'll be an easter egg.

Updating my old project to work in godot 4. Most of it’s just completely recoded (which also allowed me to work out some old bugs and go about things in a much more optimized way). Also trying out bigger, non-pixel art sprites since I'm really not that comfortable with pixel art. Don't know which will win in the end, but I like what I have right now.

Doors work normally now. In the old version, if you tried to unlock a door you would unlock every single door in the scene. I also finally added a boundary box so I don't have to reload the scene every time I fall off.

I also learned how to use singletons... I dont know why I never bothered its made my life much easier. I vaguely knew about them and was putting off implementing them because the explanation I'd found at the time was hard to follow.

Sorry to the jester tamagotchi that I havent touched in months. You'll get to see the light of day soon. Hopefully.