2024 has been an interesting year to say the least.

Having no real game-making experiance, only thoughts of how games I was playing could be improved, or ideas and concepts for games I'd had up-to now. It was a little daunting starting out, as I couldn't code and never had (other than looking at a little HTML and websites). I'd also had no real experiance of game engines and animation. However it all seemed fairly straightforward - at least on the surface.

I had started learning to code late 2023 and was getting the hang of it, so much so, that I dropped the free online course I was doing and decided to move over to a game engine, working with it's specific code and also learning the interface and functions.

Initially I was trying to learn Godot, and on a £90 used Chromebook which was a little frustrating. My original idea was creating an isometric game, but making it a story based game on a ship in the dark with a dead crew and alien on board. Working on a 2D game seemed at least the best use of my skills, having little experiance with 3D. However, the lighting wasn't working how I wanted it to as it kept bleeding through the walls due to the nature of isometric games. Apparently a shader may have fixed this issue, but it's hard to find solutions for every problem, and with almost no experiance made it harder.

So, I switched to 3D instead, and started setting up the scene - it was actually going OK, but still required a lot of experiance that I didn't have. Setting up the game, the goal was to see how I could use light and sound, along with distance to create film like atmosphere. Along with learning collisions, code and other engine functions.

The purpose of this alien game was to give me the basic code and structure for a Dracula game I want to make, but the complexity of these ideas would be pushed further and further away by the scope and lack of experiance.

My First Game

So I decided to learn a little more, with a Game Jam! Figuring I have a job and little experiance in making games that a ONE MONTH LONG game jam, should be long enough.

It wasn't (LOL)

5 and a half months later my first game Wizard Brew was complete. However it was still simple, I did spent a lot of time trying to make sure there were no bugs, it was fairly well balaned and had plenty of attention to details in the audio and menus. I know it's not a game that will win awards, though for a first game, and a few interesting ideas behind it - like the combination of making potions, battling other wizards in the level and also dumping unneccesary ingredients into another wizards pot, potentially ruining OR inadvertently helping them, as they may need different ingredients to you.

I feel it was a fairly decent attempt, and with more experiance I should revisit it in the future and potentially build something using the ideas I didn't quite manage to fit in, or didn't have the time or experiance to make work in the first game.

A couple of things I didn't like about the game, was a couple of minor issues, like one of the wizards being a bit tempremental in how it behaves, sometimes getting stuck moving between 2 points for unknown reasons. The other is using Godot 3's Navigation agent feature made it easy to get the wizard moving accross the level, however it was difficult to really control them once they were active, getting them to stop for a moment seemed harder than it should. I think they've since improved this for Godot 4, however some people have said some of the features of Godot 4 aren't as accessible as Godot 3 features.

It probably was a little ambitious making my first game something that simulates a multiplayer battle / collecting game, but here we are lol.

Play Wizard Brew

Godot and PlayStation Vita

I've also been trying to get Godot to export to PlayStation Vita, however it seems tempremental, and might be something wrong with the Vita software when installing, there's minor bugs which prevents installs. So I haven't managed to get anything to load on the Vita yet. But I really hope I can eventually.

Don't Fart In Church

For my second game, I wanted to take a silly idea and build a story around it. Taking the knowledge I have in Godot and starting to make a slightly bigger project, that focuses more on style, a linear story and something I can write and design well. Not much time or progress has been made yet, but it shouldn't be too difficult. The time consuming part will be building the scenes, animations and sound/dialogue.

The concept in brief, is your character and the inhabitants of the town are extra gassy due to anxiety. But, you're not allowed to fart in church! However, if you angle yourself correctly, you can hide your farts because they don't resonate or vibrate. This mechanic varies a couple of times in the game, and centres around the story.

I'm going to have to make a lot of fart sounds (lol), and I may have to do the voices for this game, which will be something I've never recorded before. It'll be good fun, and hopefully I won't get crucified for it.

I'd also like to thank @Chris for being the guy who keeps me accoutable, and has listened to me moan when things aren't working lol