With the metroidvania jam coming to an end; I learned a lot and thought about what to make next. I wanted to make something simple and without too many bells and whistles.

I thought about a game I played (and interviewed the creator of) called Forest’s Secret by bynine. I loved the idea of a combat-less game and having a cozy environment to slowly uncover and learn about residents. I wanted to make something similar but obviously, with my own IP, art style and own stories.

During the metroidvania jam, I kept thinking about how I could streamline my gamedev pipeline (if you could even call it that). Kind of like flowcharts to follow to make things efficiently without having to backtrack on work. Working in Unity and kind of almost relying completely on third-party or asset store templates made me realize that I really don’t have to make things from scratch as far as game engine stuff goes.

So many times over and over I started projects and get lost in the sauce on engine-dev’ing as they call it in the indie space. Trying to avoid that kind of pitfall I’ve looked into what’s already been made for people such as I.

My current dayjob is one where I usually have a bit of downtime and I don’t really have to mind anyone except my inbox so I bring my Surface Go to work with me to mostly draw or use blender. It has been surprising me with just how much the budget tablet-pc can run but with how much hard drive space is on there 32gb + my microSD 64gb there’s not a lot a lot to work with. Don’t get me wrong I love Unity and I’m still learning just how easy it really is to make any kind of game you want with it, but man is it beefy, and a Surface Go will probably have a hard time just running Unity.

Enter Godot. A lightweight game engine. Like Unity, I did not get along with Godot many a years ago, maybe I was just really unwilling to learn a new tool but it was strange to me and I ended up not really using it after a couple of tries.

This time I had a plan. /raised fist

I mainly decided that I wanted to make something simple and seeing how easy and refreshing it was to just find something in Unity’s Asset Store and mangle it into my own, I looked at Godot’s library and found a bunch of cool stuff from shaders and game templates.

I ended up choosing to use this Dynamic Split Screen Demo from the asset library, and then got some other addons/examples that I wanted to use or thought might help me. After a bit of research, googling and getting stuff to work together which really wasn’t that hard, I had somewhat of a basic template. For those interested I ended up having the following things included in my base project;

• VPainter. To hand-paint some lighting/color details on the world in the polishing stage and it’ll also help with the final terrain of the world.
• Dialogic. I’m still learning how to use this but learning this addon will save me multiple months worth of time working on the project and will give me anything I might have wanted out of a visual novel-styled dialogue system.
• Godot-EventSystem. I still haven’t sunk my teeth into this but looking at what this can do, I’m hoping I can use this to make events in a much less messy way than me attempting to learn gdscript on the spot.
• TNT-Input Engine. I really want this game to be a 2-player thing and I can’t imagine people will be comfortable playing on one keyboard even if it is a scrappy indie-game. This will cover anything I need for using gamepads.
• Godot Behavior Tree. I love designing AI, but usually detest actually implementing/programming it. Hopefully this alleviates some of the AI-making burden I usually have.
• Pause Screen. Another headache solved. I’m not sure if making a pausing system is actually a simple task in Godot but if someone’s already made example code for me to modify then I’ll take it.

I believe this covers pretty much anything I might have needed for a project like this. No combat and mostly dialogue with some things I really don’t feel like doing myself.

I’ve already started building the village the players are going to walking through. I’ve got the base mesh going but the way I made the mesh was pretty messy and I want to redo it and in a different method for art-style reasons and performance.

As for the art style, I’m really wanting to go for a Over the Garden Wall vibe with the cute/strange animal characters in a mellow/dream-like vaguely American-southern village swamp setting. Now, I’m not a historian so what I’ve been doing so far in the design phase of props and buildings is looking up something like: America/Southern State + building or prop + decade or era and copy the building styles and such. Some poor fellow who sees my game will probably have a fit on how anachronistic and mish-mashy the game is going to be lmao. I sincerely apologize.

So yeah, things are moving quick and I’m excited to work on this cute game. So, until next time!