Week 1: Getting into Godot

Here's a rundown of the happenings for week 1 of the GitHub GameOff gamejam:

This is the first time I'm partnering up for a gamejam, so I'm excited to see how it goes. The theme for the jam (cliché) was released last Tuesday and we came up with an idea for it on the same day. I pretty much looked through the list of clichés that was mentioned during the theme release, and tried to see if anything inspired an idea. Here's a brain dump of the initial idea:

Clichè: A shot in the dark 

Setting: Deep space 

Genre: Puzzle 

Premise: Your spaceship has been badly damaged and is surrounded by enemies. You're forced to reroute all power to the weapon systems which only has enough juice to fire one shot from the ship's most powerful cannon. Unfortunately, this means you're only able to see the enemy ship's positions for a second before your sensors shutdown and all goes dark. You need to aim the weapon such that it hits all the enemies with one shot, all in total darkness. 

Gameplay: The player is a spaceship that can be rotated to aim its cannon. At the start of a level, enemies are randomly spawned around the battlefield. The player has a few seconds to check the enemy locations before the screen goes dark and only the player's ship is visible. He must then aim the ship with the mouse/touch controls and fire his single shot. The bullet can be guided and follows the mouse cursor so that it can hit all the enemy ships. There can be powerups to hit as well. There will be multiple levels with different sets of challenges etc.

Obviously all of this can change if we decide during development that it's not very fun to play, but so far this is what we're working towards.

The development work done for this week was:

• Getting up-to-speed with Godot. I did some Godot learnings a few months ago, but I've never really made anything substantial with it. I'm using the docs (which are very good) to figure things out.
• Built the spaceship bridge scene which has a fancy star background generated with a shader. This unfortunately didn't work in the web version of the game due to some issues with the shader and GLES2, which forced us to target GLES3 for the game. The shader background is arguably not worth it for this and might be swapped out if there's a performance impact with GLES3.
• Incorporated the Dialogic add-on for dialog boxes. This is going to be used for the in-game tutorial and possibly other things if we have time.
• Created an enemy/obstacle spawner which is responsible for spawning entities into the scene and ensuring that they don't overlap with each other or with the player. This will be used to generate the levels and affect the difficulty of the game.
• Added the base enemy class and a few enemy types that inherit from it. The enemies will rotate to face the player. They also have little particle thrusters
• Implemented the ability for enemies to shoot projectiles at the player

And that's it. The game is coming together nicely but there's still a good deal more to do. Until next week, stay tuned for more!