incidentdweezil

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Godot-a-go-go: Faster, Better and more Enjoyable Indie Game Dev

How Unity dropped my ball but Godot picked it up, brushed it off and taught me some new moves.

If everything had gone according to plan and best hopes and dreams, you’d have been able to play a rather complete Incident Dweezil for quite a while now! ….But…. It hasn’t. And the silver lining is that Godot proves to be much better than Unity in so many ways that are important to me; Fast Compile / Launch / Iteration speed Focus on 2D Game support Powerful and fast UI Addons Trust and…

[incidentdweezil]

Godot is quite good

It really, really is. That’s the post. So good in fact, I’m looking forward to porting all my old Unity projects to Godot.

[incidentdweezil]

Have you heard of Godot?

The last few months have a been a huge mixed bag of things both Incident Dweezil centric, and that dreaded ‘IRL Centric’ Some of the good stuff was ‘Building out the piece colour matching Mini-Game’ as it’s own game to be released free to serve two goals; Be a game I really wanted to make Possibly get folks aware of Incident Dweezil via proxy Other good stuff was a big improvement to…

[incidentdweezil]

Thankfully Radio Silence = Lot's of progress

Another DevLog delayed by being busy getting things done! New Items, New Rooms, Paths, Resident Evil readables homages & more! #pointandclick #indiedev #idweezil #devlog

Incident Dweezil is still in the depths of alpha, but thankfully I’ve finished/implemented all the systems I intend to for the Demo, and squashed so many bugs, the TODO list is 99% content! The approx due date still hovers Mid-October which is nice since I’ve added so many items to the TODO list from playtesting, it was sometimes “Finish one item, add one item. Finish one item, add two items for…

[incidentdweezil]

Flurry of progress!

Jumbo DevLog touching on the benefits of Playtesting, Lore-Friendly In-game hint systems, another list of things done, and a bunch of images! #pointandclick #idweezil

The last couple of weeks have had lot’s of testing, improvements, final fixes, final additions and all kinds of other strong progress on everything from the high-end User Experience, through puzzles and content, down to the core logic/code, and is pretty damn nice to write! Demo Focus Spending a bunch of time seeing various folks play the game has been really useful in guiding what to improve…

[incidentdweezil]

TODO Doin' & Bug Squashing!

Climbing out from under 'The Rock of Productivity" for a moment with a update! #indiedev #devlog #pointandclick

It’s been a busy few weeks, productivity at the speed of doing lot’s of stuff! TODO a number bug Possibly the best bug I squashed wasn’t even in the project, but in my TODO List completion estimator. After making a calculation of how much progress I made daily, I then divided 1 by that amount, which wasn’t displaying how much time was left to complete the remaining percentage, but how much time…

[incidentdweezil]

Rough week!

A short Devlog featuring a lumpy couch, a few more ways custom Editor/IDE smooths & speeds up dev, 'Things I hope Folks Say' and another misc list! #indiegamedev #thingsIhopefolkssay #idweezil

Lot’s of things getting in the way of getting stuff done, but sometimes that’s just how it is! So this is a pretty light devlog. Out of the things that were finished, the second version of the first pass of the lumpy lounge couch (because the first version was somehow lost or never saved!) I need to make the green lighter and the stains darker to indicate they ‘soaked in’ as opposed to opaque…

[incidentdweezil]

Something old, something new.

Last weeks Devlog this week due to lot's of progress and bit of a snag. Featuring a progress graph image (as is to be expected), a single CRT filter test image, and short musing on multi genres & world building. #pointandclick #indiedev #idweezil

Busy week this week which is good, but the poor ol’ devlog kept getting pushed back. Generally I aim for Thursday evening, but found Friday’s were when I was most likely to do one, and I was fine with it sliding to Saturday, since I could try to get into a ‘Screenshot Saturday plz wishlist’ kind of routine. One of the big, positive reasons this week was so busy came from doing a huge swath of…

[incidentdweezil]

Homages, visuals, pie & shared experience!

An devlog more image-heavy than usual, touching on homages, placeholders, player agency, and understanding progress with Pie! #pointandclick #adventuregame #idweezil

And in the bork, one GUI to rule them… If you ever said to yourself ‘I could go for some pixelated late 90’s skeuomorphic design’, I may have the device for you! Not only is this an ‘in world attempt’ to explain things like Map, Music, Options, Game Same/Load, it’s also a subtle nod to the Commander Keen Dos games where the main menu was his Keen’s rad watch; Keen on the cover looking at the…

[incidentdweezil]

Just the Essentials. And Snacks.

A more wordy Dev Log, thinking about reasons to add Mechanices to the game, the progression, puzzle design, and how players perceive the flow. #indiedev #gamedesign #madewithunity #idweezil

Feature Motivation There’s been many times in my life that motivation revolved around the notion of ‘wouldn’t it be cool to make this feature / mechanic’ and though it’s fun to rise to the challenge and finally see it in action, unfortunately that motivation lessens once the mechanic is mostly complete. The “Adventure Banter” mechanic naturally hust happened, evolving out of having dynamic…

[incidentdweezil]

6 Months in...

Half a year in, reflecting on difficulty, the goals for different target audience, and some nice progress images. #indiegamedev #madewithunity #idweezil

And is it a game yet? I’d say it is! It’s not a finished game, but is more a game than it isn’t! What started as a simple ‘let’s check out this neat PowerQuest tool’ rapidly evolved into project with a big TODO list that keeps ebbing and flowing as things are finished, dismissed or held back for 2.0, and new things to do are added to improve the fun, clarity, fidelity or simply ‘oh yeah, I have…

[incidentdweezil]

Balance this, balance that.

A new Devlog touching on; Playtesting, Balance, house layout, room design, in-game tutorials and Quantum Console! #indiedev #madewithunity #idweezil

After the most recent 2 hour playtest session with someone who isn’t a ‘self described gamer’ let alone a ‘point and click adventure gamer’ I collected a most excellent pile of new things to add to the TODO list, some earlier for the demo, others later for the full release. It was a really great playtest session since the start-up time to get used to the controls and logic was very short, there…

[incidentdweezil]

A Big Box for Brainy Things.

A busy week of finishing things to finally finish once and for all, as well as polishing and cutting down that TODO list. #indiegamedev #madewithunity #idweezil

A little late on this week’s Devlog thankfully because I was busy with Dev! I’m probably going to shift the Devlog date to a different day that finds me with less weariness after a hustle of a week and more gusto. Perhaps Sunday! Fluffy’s Mini Tutorial What started as a joke about ‘You can pet the dog’ turned into a mini tutorial / hint / reminder about using ‘Talk To’ in unexpected…

[incidentdweezil]

Promises, promises, and promise.

Plans for the future! Due dates! Demos, shareware and a small bit of Blender! #gamedev #indiedev #idweezil

Added a few new calcs to the TODO graphs where it determines how many more days needed to finish the TODO list at the current pace, and right now May 20th/2024 is looking great! Still, this is very inaccurate because one item on the list can take 1000x more time than another thing, but it delivers that kind of ‘look at accomplishment made!’ endorphine(?) hit. What started out as a ‘somewhat…

[incidentdweezil]

Moving forward by going back (and sideways)

A rumination of rooms and adjusting deadline goals to be more practical, and how organizing work can be work in itself. #indiedev #gamedev

Another month down, another bunch of TODOs done, rearranged, filled out, and added to. Way back in Dec I thought to myself; “I’ll launch a modest version of the game on April 1st, which means it’ll have to be basically ‘done’ on March 1st, so I can test & polish & bugfix while also promoting it. But to do this, I’ll have to stick to keeping it simple.” Past Me, setting up Future…

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See you later Melissa!

One more darling gone, TODO Spreadsheet management, the ongoing dangers of refactoring and impending March 1st! #indiedev #gamedev

Just like Steven, I’ve had to make the tough decision to reduce the roster of choosable characters to 5 by folding most of Melissa’s dialogue and skills into the other chars, telling myself “For the first big Post-Launch update, I’ll restore her with Steven.” Fortunately, much like when I folded Steven’s lines into the other chars, I found many times it made the other characters stronger, and…

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Tinkering, tinkering...

Thoughts on dynamic speech logic, set decor, player behaviour, and launch goals! #devlog #indiegame #madewithunity

A lighter post this week (no to mention late on a Fri instead of it’s Thurs usual) due to busy-ness on other stuff, but there’s been some great progress. One of the neatest tweaks I made to the PowerQuest .ASEPRITE importer was for it to automatically find the .ASEPRITE file based on it’s own name, and configure the output folder with one click!It was already great out of the box, and this new…