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My Goals for 2025
2024 was a very nice year for me. I did so many things that I am very proud, and 2025 promises a lot. This is a very short essay about 2024 and what I expect about 2025. ## Review of my 2024 I always was very organized about the things I did and want to do, but 2024 was a special year for my organization process. I began to document almost everything about it. So looking now, I have a lot of notes I want to share with you. In this year I got to travel with my brother to a city not so far from where I live, but this was my first travel driving relative far. So we went to Holambra, State of São Paulo- Brazil, this city is known for its flowers and festivals in September, I know we got a little late (In January), but the city was very beautiful and we got to taste flower ice cream. This city was built by the Dutch, which is why it is very similar to the Netherlands, including having the largest mill in Latin America (It doesn't work, but it serves as a tourist attraction). I also got to know a lot of places with my girlfriend, we both started new jobs more flexible and got a lot of free time to spend together. With this free time I also got to help my parents in their local cafeteria located in the main park of the city. This year was very hot and this is specially good for places like parks, so we never got to work like this year, it is a good, but also we never had a free weekend in the whole year. As you may know, I started some projects specially related to gaming development. In the last months, I discovered some toys I had stored in my room, called Gogo's Crazy Bones, and decided to complete the collection. So I searched in the whole internet about them, and realized they have many collections though the year, so I started to gather information and searching in the Facebook Market Place for those toys. If you wanna see my collection, I started a Instagram and Facebook page (Soon I will also have a Youtube Channel) - [Instagram page](https://www.instagram.com/crazy.bones.toys) - [Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61570855627603) ## My goals for 2025 I hope 2025 will be even better than 2024. I'm known as one of those people who has 30 million projects, so I never have time to make them. But this year will be different. I am breaking down all of them to smaller projects so I can deliver fast. One of my goals is to create at least 2 web project per month, with my big project list in Notion, there was no shortage of ideas. Maybe one day I will share with you or make a article about simple project portfolio ideas. This year I hope to finish my Gogo's Crazy Bones collection, well, at least the Brazilian collections which includes: Geloucos, Geloucos Rockeiros, Gelo-Cósmicos, GogoToys, Gogo Fantasmas, Gogo Urban Toys, Gogo Megatrip, Futgogo, Gogo Disney 1 and 2. There is also the Dragon Ball Z Gogo's, I have some of them, but they are not that great and also very rare and expensive, so I am not in a hurry about them. Yes, a lot of collections, but all of them is almost completed, I think the Gogo Disney 2 is the one that I have the fewer, which is half of them. As said before, I would like to create a Youtube Channel to show all the collection, so be aware, Fennec Tales Collections will be soon created. I also want to a least create a steam page for a game. I don't know if I can develop the whole game in my free time this year, but I will try show as much as possible for you. I cannot say anything to you because I am still planning the base game, but you can expect a kinda roguelite game. Finally, in my personal life I want to start Muay Thai with my brother and also stay in the gym as I am right now. I also wanted to clean my portfolio in the social medias, to maybe get a better job. Thank you for reading this article and as always, see you in the next article 😉 Bye!
4 minutes read
Game Off 2024 Journey
Making games is hard, but making a game in a month is insane 🤯 I participated in Game Off 2024 and here you will find all my experiences, challenges and pain with a bonus of my first time experience using Unreal Engine 5. ## What is Game Off Game Off is a annual game jam hosted by Lee Reilly and Github. At the start of November you were given a theme and use this as base to make a game. The event allow using any kind of tech, game engines or libraries. What is important is finish the game and stick to the jam's theme. ## A game developer planning One objective I give myself this year, was to create a nice game like I did last year in this same jam. Last time I started from zero and learned about Godot, I liked but there were some limitations I faced, most likely godot developers more experienced would have knew how to handle the situation, but I as a new developer got frustrated those times, and lost a lot of time trying to understand the Godot insights. Because of that, and also a new feeling of creating something in 3D, I decided to use something else than Godot, most between Unreal and Unity. Deciding to go for Unreal, because Unity despite being very good, I would need to learn another programming language, what is not the case with Unreal, because I already now a little bit of C++ and most important, the blueprints seems a lot easier than a whole new programming language like C#. In my free time, I started to learn more about Unreal, making a simple game to learn the basics. And there we are, November is here with the new edition of Game Off 2024. ## My first thoughts In 2024, the theme was secret, could be anything related to this, even the acronyms SECRETS (For example Synchronized Events and Cryptic Riddles for Enigmatic Triggered Solutions), so the imagination go wild. But before the jam, I already had a crude base of what I want to do. I think everyone knows about Minecraft, this game was part of my life, and specially I liked to play with mods from the community, mods like IndustrialCraft, BuildCraft, ThermalExpansion, Botanica, and many others. But specially, my favorite mod by far was Thaumcraft, a magical-industrial mod that added new items, features, biomes and automation. Everything I wanted in a Minecraft mod, specially because the assets were very detailed and beautiful. But you see, in this mod there was a mechanic where you extract aspects from items, like a dirt would have aspect of Terra, or a clay would have aspect of Aqua and Terra. Those aspects could been stored in jar, where could be used to craft more advanced items. I wanted to get a similar idea for my game, probably with a Overcooked like system. The game would have a magical theme where you would extract essences from random items that would pass in a conveyor belt and then a client NPC would request a potion made by those essences. I love this idea and I will make something like this in the future, but the jam has the theme SECRETS, and how to adapt this idea for this theme? ## The creation of the core mechanic The first day of November I was trying develop some idea to fit the theme in my game, but I was not satisfied, and even using ChatGPT to get more ideas, looked like I was not getting somewhere. But suddenly I remember seeing my brother playing a game called Paper's Please. I already knew how the game worked, and I do not know why, but I got a really great idea. What if the client NPC instead of telling in your face which potion it need, use a kind of riddle in the request? Yes, there is the theme SECRETS in action, was perfect. The only problem I already was in the 3th day and at first I wanted to make the graphics like Overcooked, I have already been doing some 3D work in Blender, but you see, I was alone with the project, making a full game, with music, modeling, assets, material, code, level design and everything in my free time was very unlikely to happen, so I need to simplify the scale. ## From 3D to 2D At this point I already had knew a lot in Unreal, and was very confident about my skills, but the fear of not being able to finish the game in time made me want to change my plans, and I remember a very great game called Cookie Clicker, which have, in my opinion, a great interface for a game if that many content, why not make something similar? I do not wanted a clicker game, but I wanted the interface look of Cookie Clicker, for this reason I started to draw some raw blocking design but I wouldn't even imagine that this would have nothing to do with the final project. <Img src="/raw-draw-mystic-cauldron" name="Raw draw of the interface" alt="Raw draw of the interface" /> ## The feature eater At day 5, I already had realized that the scope of the game was too big for just me to handle in a month. For that reason, I started to remove some features like the conveyor belt and sticking more with the core mechanic- Player would have to guess what potion the client NPC wanted by it's hints. If you do not realized from the raw draw, I had a lot of unnecessary widgets that could be cut from the project. In the end I got a very minimalistic style that could be done easily in a month, and if left some time, I could improve by adding features like upgrades. ## The game Finally I had something. The core concept still remains- Players would guess what type of potion a NPC client want. I decided to go with 5 essences (Earth, Water, Fire, Disorder and Magic), and making a potion by adding two essences and one flavour(refreshing, sweet and spicy), the order would not matter, so Earth + Water, would get the same result as Water + Earth. This gives me a total of 10 different potions and more 5 because I wanted a double potion like Earth + Earth, total of 15 essences, so I would need to create at least 15 dialog, which seems too much, but is not, specially with the help of ChatGPT. The roadmap stay like that- NPC came and asks for a potion, you as a player, need to select the right essences and then craft a potion. It will take some seconds to craft, and then you can verify with the NPC if is the correct one, if not, you can store for the next NPC or delete. After a successful request, you earn some money to spend in upgrades and after delivering all the potions from that level, you go to the next, where new potions will be asked. <Img src="/monster-button-3d" name="" alt="A very big wall populated with buttons" /> ## Work in progress I started coding the project in the 8th day, which could be alarming, but I felt everything organized and ready to go. In the first days, I wanted to know, if with those features simplified, I could do a 3D game, so I sacrifice 2 days by making like a button monster and configuring the camera, but in the second day, I realized I was losing too much time in unnecessary things like the camera, so I went for my original plan of doing a 2D game. Unreal have a great system of interfaces called widgets or UMG, soon after, I already had learned will be way quicker than a 3D game, but I also realized that the assets would be made very soon or I would need to get from internet. In the mean time, I was doing the code with mocked images, like white squares and colored circles and I had made my first part of the game- Essence selector and I was ready for the next step, the crafting station, or so I thought 😰. <Img src="/first-essence-selector" name="Essence Selector" alt="Square full of button circles that represents the essences" /> ## My new nightmare- timers The crafting station would need to have the crafting part and the balcony part. I first made the crafting and was very easy to add the essences from the essence selector, but I never could image how hard would be to make the crafting part. If you do not remember, I had a plan of making the crafting some seconds long, so player would not spam potions, but for some reason I could not make the timer work properly and for worst I could not even debug that, because sometimes would work and sometimes not. I remember losing a LOT of time in this feature, I tried a lot of strategies, even recursion. But I always end in the same problem. Today I feel like I would suffered a lot less if I had read the full documentation. So if you are new to programming or want to get better, read the documentation, specially if is in a great organization and had lot of content, like the Unreal. But at this point I did not have time to read the full documentation and the page of timer was confusing to me. I decided to leave the bug and start to do something else, maybe in the future I could solve this. ## From hell to heaven- Data Tables While I could not solve the bug, I started to make some changes in the main structures- You see, before, I had a enumeration for the essences and then when crafting, they need to look of each recipe to see what is right. I know the game has a small scale, but I wanted to learn the right way now, start my studies in what is called Data Tables, some beautiful and shiny solutions for my problem. You can think in it as a collection of structures, or objects in other programming languages. With that in my, I know if I want to add more potions or essences in the future, would be very easy. I want to take a few lines to explain how I did the logic of ids. First, every essence has a id, 1-Water, 2-Fire, 3-Earth, 4-Magic, 5-Disorder, but the potions has an id of a string of the ids that made that potion, for example, Pure water potion has an id of 1_1, the Water-Fire is 1_2, always registering the potion with the smaller essence id first than the greater one. With this, when searching for the specific potion, the code will always knew the right id, for example if I give essence magic and earth, the output will be 3_4, so just look for this id and nothing more. When researching about this, I also came along a very good strategy for a game with many crafts, like Minecraft. And is using a table for the items, and a separated table for the recipes, this makes code for organized and will be easier later if need to add more recipes for the same item. I know my game will not have more recipes in the future, so this is not a problem. Before going to the next point, I also want to say that I dropped the idea of flavours, I thought the game was good enough without them. ## Thanks free assets The journey was tough, but would be even tougher without free assets. The majority was modified by me, but they gave me easy and a fast way of creating the perfect feeling I was looking for my game. Thank you for all people who did it. I would never did the game in a month without them. Assets list: - [Free 39 Portraits Pixel Art Game Assets](https://free-game-assets.itch.io/free-39-portraits-pixel-art-game-assets) - [[Valley Friends] Potions](https://pixerelia.itch.io/vf-potions) - [Cursor Pack](https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pack) - [Modern Interiors](https://limezu.itch.io/moderninteriors) - [Sunset Tavern in the woods](https://www.fab.com/listings/550baecc-f4cb-4071-91f5-0af0391481c6) - [RPG Essentials SFX Free](https://leohpaz.itch.io/rpg-essentials-sfx-free) ## Last bug corrections In the end of the month, there were a lot to fix and make the game "playable", so I focused on this, specially the timer problem. I take a lot of time to learn how properly use the timer's functions in Unreal. I think they are a bit of confusing, and as I did not have so much time to deep learning, bring me a lot of trouble. Other bug that gave me headaches was the cursor which came in the center of the screen for no reason and in a randomly way, this I could not solve it 😞. Well there was minimum corrections, but in the end I posted the game on December first. ## What I think This was a short but also intense month, which game me a lot of experience in developing games in Unreal, and also put in practice a more complex idea than previous projects. I really liked and in 2025 expect me participating more and more in game jams out there. Thank you so much for reading this article. If you wanna see and play the game for yourself [take a look](https://drafonf.itch.io/mystic-cauldron) and as always, see you in the next article 😉 Bye!
12 minutes read
Game Off 2023 Journey
This blog post is my journey into Game Off 2023 by Github and Lee Reilly, started on November 01 and ended December 01. It's my very first big game project, I am so exited! I will update this page every day, telling what I did and the expectations to the next day. ## Day 01 I was so excited to participate. I remember only making one game in Javascript very simple, three or four years ago, I think using [P5](https://p5js.org), It was a runner game, like the [Google's Chrome Dinosaur Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_Game), very nice, but I think something more complex. This day was the great theme reveal, which was *Scale*. It was very nice, very embracing. The first moment I thought in making something like [Cuphead](https://store.steampowered.com/app/268910/Cuphead), a boss battle rush themed as [pirate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Piracy) or other theme related to sea that I can fit [scales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_(anatomy)). <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/dedf7b77-3049-44d9-a724-47bcbea0eddc" name="Game's off 2023 theme" alt="Print showing Game's Off Site Scale theme description" /> Thinking more about, a boss battle rush would be very difficult for my first game because I need to create a lot of mechanics, and in one month maybe it's not possible. So I decided to go to [scale, an increasing stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_(ratio)). I thought in games like [Vampire Survivors](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/?snr=1_5_9__205), a bullet hell game. Maybe I cannot do a lot of enemies variations, but I think I will go if this. ## Day 02 This day I was searching for a game engine. As I only code one game, I do not have an expertise of how game engine is better for my choices, so I take a time to study some of the engines recommended in the Game Off 2023 page. I started in [Unity](https://unity.com), It's a very good engine to design first games because it's simple and intuitive. I also look at [Unreal](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US), with a very good lighting system and incredible stuff to handle 3D games it's probably the best engine out there for someone trying a next gen game, but for me that is my first game, and will probably be a 2D game, Unreal would be kill a mosquito with a bazooka, and for this, Unreal will not be my choice. The last engine I tried was [Godot](https://godotengine.org), a very good engine open source that you can create 2D and 3D games, but I think the greater part is for 2D games. Godot has a scripting language called [GDScript](https://godotengine.org/features/#script) with a very simple syntax inspired mostly by [Python](https://www.python.org), a programming language that I used a lot on my side projects. In the end I chose Godot, mostly because GDScript is so similar to Python that I had the better experience of the three ones. Godot is also intuitive, and I think my challenge in the next days will learn everything about Godot and create the game. I had a little extra time in this day, and started to learn about Godot using the Godot's fundamental's playlist in the [Game Dev Artisan channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YNKi3hcS5U&list=PLrnWJKR7bTuw7L0g70GzCM-cUr9XmtnAp). ## Day 03 This was a not good day. I mostly study how to use Godot, I learned to create collision and pickup items, but I tried to refactor my files and I delete my Player with all the animations and logic already finished 🥲🥲🥲. I stopped and I hope tomorrow will be a better day. Well at late night I thought better and decided to start a new project, this time, with a better preparation, and clarification of the ideas. I started searching in the assets I downloaded at [Ichio.io](https://itch.io/game-assets). I found a very good collection with free license [Ninja Adventure](https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack), it has a full set of incredible pixel art with event dialog faces that I can use in the buy menu. The next step was think of what type of game I wanted and maybe, a tower defense it's really nice and I can reuse some code to other enemies. Other point is the map, I just need to create one for this first time. To get started I search in the assets pack and decided the towers. Of course I can have a lot of towers, but the game is scope is to be small and fishable until December, so I cut and decided to create only 6 towers, each one being unique and having a upgraded version. Name|Damage|Sprite normal|Sprite special|Weapon :---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---: Knight|area, close||| Mage|single, far||| Support|None (gain coins and life)||| Ice man|area, far (Slow the enemies)||| Ice ball Defense|None (Stops the enemies with barrier)|||Stone Rock barrier Summon|single, close||| And when thinking of enemies, I would like to show the first boss early because, the objective is to create a simple game, so I decided to separate into 20 levels and each level will have a new enemy. Maybe I will change this in the future and just have 4 levels with a longer duration each one with a boss in the end. I don't know, and we will see what I end doing. For now, the level are these: Level|Slot|Slot|Slot|Slot|Slot|Boss :---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---: 1|||x|x|x|x 2||||x|x|x 3|||||x|x 4||||||x 5|||||| 6|||x|x|x|x 7||||x|x|x 8|||||x|x|x 9||||||x 10|||||| 11|||x|x|x|x 12||||x|x|x 13|||||x|x 14||||||x 15|||||| 16|||x|x|x|x 17||||x|x|x 18|||||x|x 19||||||x 20|||||| The main idea is that each tower can be good/bad to a enemy type. For example the Knight tower is only able to damage near enemies but can deal area damage, so It's good to enemies that come in groups(Mostly land), on the other hand the Mage tower has single shot and far distance, which is good to fast and single enemies(Mostly air). ## Day 04 This day I was little busy playing tennis with my brother and my girlfriend. Was the first time we played, it's nice, but tiring. Anyways, in the spare time I worked at creating the project on Godot (I know it still has the songs and tiles, but this I choose later). This time I looked a lot in the [Godot Documentation](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/index.html) therefore I don't have much to say, I mostly just studied. ## Day 05 Today is Sunday, so I have all the time to play around with the game building. I started to follow a Youtube series [from Game Development Center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFdpCGbrVXI&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6), it's a bit out of date, but we can get a very good idea to how tower defense games are. The first classes is to structure the project and make the first configurations on Godot. He said that we can reuse this to future projects. First, the folder structure. It is separated in 6 folders, the first one being the `Assets`, that is branched into `Environment`, `Icons` and `UI`, everything auto explaining. Inside the `Environment` we have `Props`(Files with one asset per file) and `Tilesets`(Files with two or more assets in). The `Licenses` is where you store license of fonts, assets and everything else. The `Resources` is objects that will be reused on project. The Scenes is where will be store all the objects(Classes) created. Lastly we have Singletons, objects that are independent from the rest of project. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/90c25a0f-701a-46fc-a34f-7c9bfff6ec7a" name="Folder structure" alt="Folder structure" /> Other thing I did is the first map, I finally learned about [tilesets](https://docs.godotengine.org/pt-br/4.x/classes/class_tileset.html). Following the documentation and the [video of Game Development Center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQKpBCmkvk) I finally make the first map using some scalable techniques like make terrains. Terrains for now is just used to create roads, that using assets Godot can automatically find the right asset to that road, this way I don't need to find the right asset to that corner on the road. I followed [this tutorial by Maker Tech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aVQ2ylMrU). The map has still really poor flora and I want to trees like terrains, to be more efficient in creating forests (If you pay attention, there are some tiles with bugged trees). In general was a very productive game. If I hope I can keep up this rhythm. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/ab6f4c7a-500f-4dc3-9e87-d8a05bb2f66c" name="Fist scenario" alt="Fist scenario with a lot of trees and a really strange path" /> ## Day 06 This day I was busy with some stuff and could not make any progress 🥲🥲🥲 ## Day 07 I know I should give more attention to the map, but everything seems kind weird. The scale doesn't seems right. That's because I need to confirm that the scale is right to create the map based on. So I decided to create the first tower of the game, thinking mostly in adapt the scale (Spoiler *I did not have the time to play with the scale*). Anyways, I started with `node2D` and then put the sprite inside, I don't know if this is the best practice, but for me, giving a wrapper of `node2D` makes me feel more organized. The sprite for now will be the idle: <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/3a8c84b0-8d1d-4ccc-995f-cce346e14ada" name="Idle Knight animation" alt="Idle Knight animation spritesheet" /> One thing is that it has right, left, bottom and top sides, which gives me the necessity to turn the sprite as the enemy changes it's direction. I started trying the sprite to follow my mouse, after many tries, I came with a simple code, but I happy that I can understand everything from this code. 😁 ```python extends Node2D var direction = Vector2(0, 0) func _physics_process(delta): turn() func turn(): var target_position = get_global_mouse_position() var character_position = global_position direction = (target_position - character_position).normalized() if(direction.x > abs(direction.y)): get_node("Knight").set_frame(3) elif direction.x < -abs(direction.y): get_node("Knight").set_frame(2) elif direction.y > abs(direction.x): get_node("Knight").set_frame(0) else: get_node("Knight").set_frame(1) ``` <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/ca045152-c4bb-4d7a-947f-a29860f2eee7" name="Mouse following" alt="Gif showing character knight follows the mouse direction" /> ## Day 08, 09, 10 and 11 I am gonna group all these days together because I really did not have a lot of time to progress in the game and the little time I had was trying to make the map looks a little bit better. It was really hard, not because the sprites, they are awesome, it's because of me, I did not have and experience grouping those tiles together in a pleasant way to the eye. I don't know, I was looking for a diverse map, having the flower, ice, rocky and forest parts, but I don't know, something looks out of place. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/8add9292-f00c-4027-9fc4-bcd2073e91c2" name="Map details" alt="Add more details(maybe too much) and removed most of trees" /> ## Day 12 This day I created another tower and rescale the ***knight*** already created to fit better in the map. It was very nice, I learned about scaling and import pixel art in Godot 4. I also put a base in tower to better highlight on map. The code part was very easy, following the tutorial [Game Development Center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHGEiQhR1PQ&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=3) I just imported the logic from a generic class. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/fcb3e20c-5cc4-46e5-875c-5aac6817c6bd" name="Tower Knight and Mage" alt="Picture showing the two towers created, one the knight and other the mage" /> ## Day 13 It was a very short day. The only thing I could do was the main menu. I was following the video of Game Development Center, but in Godot 4, some methods have changed, main thing is to **connect** now is deprecated and we need to use something like `[Node].[Signal].connect([method])` instead of `.connect([signal], [object], [method]` <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/94a8289c-ca05-4aa0-ad54-636d5b24d053" name="Menu" alt="Picture showing the menu created, three blue buttons" /> ## Day 14 This is one more busy day, I just make some initial HUD, following the same tutorial of [Game Development Center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5YsM-dLbCA&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=4). It was kinda simple because this hud doesn't do anything else, it's just two images. I used the assets of [Ninja's Adventure](https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack) again, they are just wonderful, I just need to make them smaller, but this is problem for other day. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/4540f130-9de2-4318-8ab1-5fa8aff532b2" name="HUD" alt="Showing the HUD below the map, having only the image of the two towers" /> ## Day 15, 16 and 17 These days I found a very big problem 😓. At day 15 I was intended to do the fifth part of the [Game Development Center Godot's tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W4zVD-kOwU&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=6), but there were a lot of different things I did in the project that I was getting the consequences. Like the resolution of 1280x720 is too big for a 16x16 assets of [Ninja's Adventure](https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack), so I tried to add scale and messed with everything else, now, 4 tiles were supposed to be just 1, and the collision system was not working and I knew I needed to make a work around that I would not like. So after trying many strategies, I just stopped 😕. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/0105d092-1eda-4a39-b605-3e2333f4a00f" name="Building tower" alt="User clicks in the HUD and get the tower to build it" /> ## Day 18 I was so frustrated because of bugs that I decided not think about it today. ## Day 19, 20 and 21 Even if I was frustrated, I have not given up, and would make the game from zero if necessary. And so I did, not everything, but I can guarantee was a lot. One of the many problems was the scale, resolution and sprite sizes. The problem I had was a pixelart game with assets of 16x16 that was running on a resolution of 1280x720 which are 1280/16 * 720/16 = **3,600** tiles to fill the entire screen. Think about it, every sprite is 16x16, *even the towers* which in the 3600 tiles, max 10 would be towers, of course this will cause a strange sensation, ***it's not in the right scale***. To solve this, I scale some arts, like the towers and bases, this way, a tower had 1 tile size, but the path was 3 tiles size. You can imagine the problem when making collisions. To solve this, I changed the ***Viewport width and height*** to something way smaller (**320x192**) and put the ***Window Width and height Override*** to 3 times of the **Viewport size**. This way, the game will have a resolution of 320x192 and will open in a window of 960x576, making all the scale for me. The game now doesn't needed to scale some arts, everything from enemies, path and towers will be 16x16 and just one tile. I did a small change on the [Ninja's Adventure' assets](https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack) because some tiles were way to big for me, and then I made them smaller (Logs and a type of grass). <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/e71883a2-56cf-43b0-addc-49873b9fd0bf" name="Fixing viewport" alt="Picture showing the viewport 320 x 192 and the override 960 x 572" /> <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/8804a239-4187-4f20-8a73-b5ec86cfd2f7" name="Map remade" alt="The new map with only one clear path at center and forest borders, the HUD now is in the right, very clean layout" /> Now using a resolution of 320x192 gives us 320/16 * 192/16 = **240** tiles only. It may look way to little, but is not. I feel I can make better maps with this size. Of course this brought me a lot of more problems 🥲. All the assets in the scenes were with wrong sizes and so I went in every scene fixing the bugs (towers, map, ui, menu, everything 🥲. If you are starting as me, just make sure the scale is right 😅). In this process I redid the menu, ui and the map. Here is the final result: <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/08ce33c1-c752-4c92-9527-f4440ceb74ff" name="New menu" alt="Remake of menu, now is dark with shadows on buttons" /> *Note*: I leaned how to animate some sprites in the map 🤩🤩🤩. # Day 22 Now after all that remake I finally can move on to other features. In this day I finish the selection and collision/building tower system. There were some changes to make from tutorial because Godot 4 has changed some names, but essentially is the same of the [Game Development Center's tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K1c4OfC2SU&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=5). <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/2d81e57a-a589-47a2-aad0-32be40018016" name="Collision" alt="Gif showing when tower is pickup you cannot put in other tower, or blocked grid" /> I also did a very simple thing that I was supposed to do in the first time starting this project 😅. A [git repo](https://github.com/fescherer/game-off-2023). ## Day 23 Now I can see a game under construction. This day I make a range indicator to tower following [Game Development Center's tutorial #5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W4zVD-kOwU&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=6). This range can be configured in a separate file, this way the towers can have different sizes of ranges (Of course this file also can be used to configured damage, rate of fire, cost, etc.). <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/d1230900-33e8-4ede-9d3a-628b9cd60b84" name="Range indicator" alt="A gif showing the range indicator, green circle area in the character" /> ## Day 24 It has finally come, the day I built the enemies. A enemy in a tower defense game should not be a problem, because it's IA is just- "Follow the path", and so I just need to configure the path and make the enemy follow it. Can easy be done using [Godot's Path2D](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_path2d.html). My problem was not configure this path, but configure enemy's animation, well the [Game Development Center's tutorial #6](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBQgmy3Oiw4&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=7) uses a top down view asset, as [Ninja's Adventure' assets](https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack) uses side view assets, so just rotating the sprite will not work in my case. I did by calculating how the position is different from the last frame and give the right animation. Solving this made my day 😊😊😊. So Happy 😁. ```GDScript extends PathFollow2D @onready var _animated_sprite = get_node("CharacterBody2D").get_node('AnimatedSprite2D') var speed = 0.5 var last_position = Vector2(0, 0) func _physics_process(delta): move(delta) func move(delta): set_progress(get_progress() + speed + delta) var current_position = position if(last_position != current_position): if(abs(last_position.x) < abs(current_position.x)): # Going Right _animated_sprite.play('east') if(abs(last_position.x) > abs(current_position.x)): # Going Left _animated_sprite.play('west') if(abs(last_position.y) < abs(current_position.y)): # Going down _animated_sprite.play('south') if(abs(last_position.y) > abs(current_position.y)): # Going up _animated_sprite.play('north') last_position = current_position ``` <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/36af2dec-a5e7-44f3-a92d-e881252e0c74" name="Enemy" alt="First enemy following the path. It is an angry bamboo enemy" /> ## Day 25 As I solve a lot of problems in the last days, I lost my track of progressing the game creation, so this day I finally had the sense of progression. I did a lot of things. First of all, I make a start/pause/fast forward system. Very simple, just followed [Game Development Center's tutorial #7](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1auCC-PT4k&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=8) and make some simple pixelart 16x16 sprites, because [Ninja's Adventure](https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack) didn't have sprites for arrow, double arrow and pause. Second, the tower need to look at enemy and not my mouse 😅 I followed the most part of the [Game Development Center's tutorial #8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugNRDsl33OI&list=PLZ-54sd-DMAJltIzTtZ6ZhC-9hkqYXyp6&index=9), but seeing the comments, we could improve the tower tracking. In the video, Stefan select the enemy with most progress in the path (Which is very good, because more progress in the path, means more likely to complete the path), but this gets a problem when using more than one path. Think with me, if we have two paths and enemies in both that crossed the same amount of pixels, the tower will get confused with enemy is the right to pick. The best choice will be get the enemy with the largest progression and in the shortest path. For example if we have two paths, one having 450px size and other having 200px size, there are enemies in both paths and the enemies have crossed the same amount of pixels, like 30. The progress of the first path will be 450 - 30 = 420, and the second will be 200 - 30 = 170, if we get the largest number, the enemy on path1 will be chosen, but can agree that is more likely to enemy on path two finish the path, because only need to cross more 170 instead of 420 in the first path. So that's why we need to get the minimum value. After this though I made the damage system. It was very simple, the only thing I did different from the tutorial was that there, Stefan put a heath bar above the enemy. In my case, I changed the enemy color based on heath percentage like: heath > 70% = Normal Color; heath > 50% = Yellowish; heath > 20% = Orangish; else = Reddish. The last thing I did was a shooting mechanic. In the tutorial, the towers shoot the same projectile, but in my game, it needs to be different so I abstracted the code and make a muzzle and impact animation for each tower, so thats in the future I can add a projectile to certain towers, like the Mage one, and for the Knight it does not need this. I will think more about this tomorrow. The result: <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/2b8b60d8-c0c1-4d93-817a-9c8a1835c1b7" name="Powers" alt="Knight powers, lounging his spear" /> ## Day 26 This was a very simple day I just make the system of health and coin, there is no much to say. I just make some signals that are emit when enemy is killed or its complete the map's path. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/f11b65d3-b434-434a-a861-0b161788ab7f" name="Coin - Health" alt="Gif showing the HUD with coins and health and every enemy defeated, add one coin, if the enemy escapes, you loose one life" /> ## Day 27, 28, 29 and 30 As the voting day is coming, I decided to focus in finish the main mechanics instead of adding new stuff, so I decided to make the last updated in this article grouping all the stuff made in the last 4 days.😶🌫️ Well, first of all, as usual I went through the game and noticed 4 things to do: The game need waves counter, more enemies, about page (Where the credits of me and Ninja's Adventure will be), and for last, there are some bugs to take care. The first thing I did was about the waves. This time I would finally make the balance between towers and enemies (I can say to that I though would be easy, but not, this is a very crucial part that can make your game look good or terrible). Was very hard to do that, but I made. I add a simple wave counter, and made the waves into an `GameData` dictionary so I could easily modify. I add two more screens, one for `Game over` and other for `Game Win`. And of course, more enemies. They are just an extension of the main enemy's script, with some values and sprites changed (In the future, I want to make this less manual, to add even more enemies, creating a scene in usual way is no good). In the meantime I noticed that the game was very short, so I add a `Infinity mode` that would spawn random enemies (In the end, this was supposed to be a very challenging mode, but proved to be not so difficult, in the future I will change that). The about page was very easy to make. It's just a simple new scene. The more complicated part was to create a `Game over` and `Game win` because these two scenes need to be over `game's scene` and not in root. But it was ok, and simple to do.😊 In the bug's part, there were a lot linked to the wave system. I don't know, but making all that logic in just one script just made it very confusing. This is one more thing to change in the future, a better `game's script`, I don't know, maybe just separate the logic of spawning enemies, controlling the waves, building towers and enemies path in a separate script would make so much better. It had a bug in the fast forward too, but I could not had time to fix this, so it will be a future issue 😅. You can play the game at [Itch.io](https://drafonf.itch.io/enchanted-towers-realm-defenders). Leave a message to me. I will be very happy to talk to you 😊. <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/2f68d076-42f7-459e-b723-6ac36d7ceb98" name="Final results" alt="Gif showing everything made, with new enemies- bugs" /> <Img src="https://github.com/fescherer/blog/assets/62115215/d9dc2485-144c-4e6f-9b9d-08e23b67b1af" name="Game over screen" alt="Game over screen, reddish, with two buttons to leave or play again" /> ## Final thoughts Well, what I learned with all this? This was my first experience making a game in a professional way (In some pro engine), so because of this there was many days that I was unmotivated, even if I came from web programming, coding in game, it's harder (Maybe that's because I did not knew the language) and that made me a little frustrated, but as I was going, never giving up, I saw a light in end of the tunnel. Some stuff that was hard to understand like what is a scene, became very easy and I could make all the changes that my imagination could have. I really like the experience. Well, there was many thing I could not had time to develop. If you see the first days of this article, you will understand that, I planned a lot of things, the scope was too big for a first project that needed to be made in just a month, but that's ok, I plan to add these things later, I will finish the game as was proposed back there. For last, thanks everyone who read this article. It was a very difficult month, but I could say that I very happy and proud about the results. I see you in the next article. Have a nice day. 😎✨✨✨😎. dt
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