#Godot Programmers

[undertalerebirth]

PLEASE go check out Dusttale Brotherly Love by

@/sharkyleo  ! It's one of the most unique Dusttale takes out there and the project/team is in desperate need of Godot Coders!

DUSTTALE: Brotherly LOVE aims to serve a full-length DUSTTALE take but with a twist: What if there was more than one assassin?

By taking popular concepts from the base version of the UNDERTALE AUs "DUSTTALE" and "DUSTBELIEF" as well as many other takes over the years, we aim to deliver a take never seen before, while attempting to create a middle ground between canon-compliant writing as well as originality.

Q: What sets this take apart from others?

A: A lot! I can't publicly share too much YET, but with what's currently public I can share;

- First, routes! Most DUSTTALE games suffer from the lack of freedom of choice that the original UNDERTALE had, which in my opinion was quite limiting to the narrative of UNDERTALE and DUSTTALE's potential as a whole.

- Second, the fate of many characters! Most DUSTTALE takes suffer from the issue of sort of pushing aside other characters to put up other characters and make them seem cooler. No more! The rest of the characters will also get their part in the spotlight.

- Third, playable Sans + Papyrus. Their gameplay will contain both DELTARUNE and Mario Bros. Superstar Saga inspired gameplay, with their own unique style of gameplay and overworld!

Q: Can I use publicly shown assets for my own projects?

A: No. The only case I would allow you to use assets from my take is if it's a fan-remake or fan interpreted game based off my take. However, even in those cases, PLEASE credit us first.

Q: Will the fangame focus more on Sans, Papyrus, or both the skele-bros?

A: The fangame will balance both of them equally between routes.

Q: When will this game release?

A: This project is OST-first, while game development happens behind the scenes. Don't expect this to release for many years. Demos may come eventually, but game development is an extremely tiring task, so we ask you to be patient. If you REALLY need content I would suggest you head to our Discord and SoundCloud page, as those is our most active platforms.

~~~~~~

Application Form: https://dyno.gg/form/6679d932

GAMEJOLT: https://gamejolt.com/games/dusttalebrotherlylove/894979

(Please they really do need the help, even of you can't join sharing this post would still help out a lot!)

[ganondoodle]

oh no, i tried pixel animation again and now im afraid ill fall back into wanting to do gamedev even though i literally have to learn everything still and its not doable in the time frame my brain wants it and i still have so much else to do hhhhhhhhhhhh

[sonicbattlelm]

Additional Programmers Needed

WELCOME TO SONIC BATTLE** :

LOST MEMORIES.

A Brand new Ambitious Sonic Fighting Game;

Tweaking the old assets and bringing new elements in while keeping its GBA design!

You have a game that is worth joining!!

All we need is couple programmers who can help speed up the process as we code on Godot 4.x!!!

Fill out the form below to be apart of the fight! ( Serious inquiries only )

—————————————————-

Synopsis of story: 

Sonic sits with Uncle Chuck at the chili dog stand, sharing stories and reminiscing about their past adventures, including their connection with Emerl. Uncle Chuck, unfamiliar with Emerl, asks if a chili dog might distract Sonic from his thoughts. As they chat, a radio broadcast reports about the appearance of enigmatic robots causing chaos across Mobius. Ben Muttiski arrives but is persuaded by Uncle Chuck to help manage the chili dog stand.

Tails rushes in, urgently informing Uncle Chuck that Sonic sped off to warn Sally and gather the Freedom Fighters. Tails catches up with Sonic, conveying the gravity of the situation. Sonic, already aware, humorously prepares for action while acknowledging Tails' seriousness. They unite with Sally and the Freedom Fighters, inspired by the events of the ''Countdown to Chaos'' arc from the Archie Comics. This marks the start of the "Neublite War" arc, where Werehog Sonic's potential involvement is contemplated.

Amidst strategizing for the impending conflict with the mysterious robots, the team gears up, anticipating a significant showdown.

Here’s some footage above of the prototype:

[pilebunkers]

I don't know if you've heard already, but O'Keeffe is going to be a romance option in that AC6 dating sim: https://www.patreon.com/collection/200948?view=expanded

Hi anon!!! Thank you for sending this along. (: Unfortunately dating sims aren't really my thing. But I'm excited for the people who are interested in them (and the art is certainly beautiful!) and I'm glad more people will be exposed to the love of my life, V.III O'Keeffe. I'll be curious to see what direction the team takes with everyone who only has a sparse few lines ingame.

[hauntoadcayde]

Barfing out Programmer Art into Procreate is so freeing tbh, such a good brain itch

[l0stw00d]

local guy tries 2 learn javascript. decides it might be a mistake actually.

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

Over the past few weeks, I've been learning and experimenting within Godot to gain a fundemental understanding of it, having no previous experience, I felt it best to test and experiment instead of trying to mesh parts of tutorials together to fit my needs.

I now feel like I am at a stage where I can attempt to develop my game idea into a playable demo, This is the progress so far:

We have tilesets and maps with collisions and phsyics set up, player movement, sprites and animations with collisions, attacks and basic map interaction with layers and the player.

I wont say its been easy because it hasn't, It's been challenging but a very rewarding challenge, to say the least.

Onwards and upwards!

[somerandev]

🤾🏻‍♀️ Day 4 of Daily Devlogs for 🫱Teleport Man🫲

Polished up throwing + added the arm throwing animation. Had a lot of trouble transferring the player's velocity to the object so it doesn't end up slower than the player mid-run. But I got it workin and twerkin.

Anyway, the lighting is being weird (ᵃˢ ʸᵒᵘ ᶜᵃⁿ ᵗᵉˡˡ ᶠʳᵒᵐ ᵗʰᵉ ᵛᶦᵈᵉᵒ), so I guess that's tomorrow's problem lol.

[zoeticthoughts]

It's so crazy to me how i would expect the ratio of programmers getting into gamedev vs. artists getting into gamedev to be like 60/40, +/- 5% or so, but based on what I'm seeing it's like 20/80. Something must be wrong with my priors!

[lilybug-02]

Play Tomorrow's Shape Here

Hello my lovely Tumblereeñas. I made a game with my friend for Godot Wild Game Jam. It's a visual novel game with routing mini-games!

((The mini-games are VERY HARD, plz don't be alarmed when you play, as there will be no game overs, so no sweat. 😅)) Plus the game is less than 15 minutes :)

But, this was my first time EVER participating in a creative project like this and I had a very good time throughout the entire process.

IRateBurritos was our lead programmer and drew the mini-game "arrows, stop signs, and conveyer belts". Everything else was me. Backgrounds, character animations, text box animation, and Title/Logo. I've very proud of how it all turned out. 🟩🟣💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

⬇️⬇️⬇️ Really wish we had gotten this little mouse to translate to the players mouse, but I think the computer hates me or smth.

⬇️⬇️⬇️ The drawings below do not reflect all of the assets we used for the game, but they are examples of how my animations looked for our "sprite sheets". Using PROCREATE was insane but it worked so I can't complain <3

I wanted everything to have eyes. Because YES.

Anyways, thanks for taking an interest in it :) it was fun!

[qwertyprophecy]

Mortholme Post-Mortem

The Dark Queen of Mortholme has been out for two weeks, and I've just been given an excellent excuse to write some more about its creation by a lenghty anonymous ask.

Under the cut, hindsight on the year spent making Mortholme and answers to questions about game dev, grouped under the following topics:

Time spent on development Programming Obstacles Godot Animation Pixel art Environment assets Writing Completion Release

Regarding time spent on development

Nope, I’ve got no idea anymore how long I spent on Mortholme. It took a year but during that time I worked on like two other games and whatever else. And although I started with the art, I worked on all parts simultaneously to avoid getting bored. This is what I can say:

Art took a ridiculous amount of time, but that was by choice (or compulsion, one might say). I get very excitable and particular about it. At most I was making about one or two Hero animations in a day (for a total of 8 + upgraded versions), but anything involving the Queen took multiple times longer. When I made the excecutive decision that her final form was going to have a bazillion tentacles I gave up on scheduling altogether.

Coding went quickly at the start when I was knocking out a feature after another, until it became the ultimate slow-burn hurdle at the end. Testing, bugfixing, and playing Jenga with increasingly unwieldy code kept oozing from one week to the next. For months, probably? My memory’s shot but I have a mark on my calendar on the 18th of August that says “Mortholme done”. Must’ve been some optimistic deadline before the ooze.

Writing happened in extremely productive week-long bursts followed by nothing but nitpicky editing while I focused on other stuff. Winner in the “changed most often” category, for sure.

Sound was straightforward, after finishing a new set of animations I spent a day or two to record and edit SFX for them. Music I originally scheduled two weeks for, but hubris and desire for more variants bumped it to like a month.

Regarding programming

The Hero AI is certainly the part that I spent most of my coding time on. The basic way the guaranteed dodging works is that all the Queen’s attacks send a signal to the Hero, who calculates a “danger zone” based on the type of attack and the Queen’s location. Then, if the Hero is able to dodge that particular attack (a probability based on how much it's been used & story progression), they run a function to dodge it.

Each attack has its own algorithm that produces the best safe target position to go to based on the Hero’s current position (and other necessary actions like jumping). Those algorithms needed a whole lot of testing to code counters for all the scenarios that might trip the Hero up.

The easiest or at least most fun parts for me to code are the extra bells and whistles that aren’t critical but add flair. Like in the Hero’s case, the little touches that make them seem more human: a reaction speed delay that increases over time, random motions and overcompensation that decrease as they gain focus, late-game Hero taking prioritising aggressive positiniong, a “wait for last second” function that lets the Hero calculate how long it’ll take them to move to safety and use the information to squeeze an extra attack in…

The hardest attack was the magic circle, as it introduced a problem in my code so far. The second flare can overlap with other attacks, meaning the Hero had to keep track of two danger zones at once. For a brief time I wanted to create a whole new system that would constantly update a map of all current danger zones—that would allow for any number of overlapping attacks, which would be really cool! Unfortunately it didn’t gel with my existing code, and I couldn’t figure out its multitudes of problems since, well…

Regarding obstacles

Thing is, I’m hot garbage as a programmer. My game dev’s all self-taught nonsense. So after a week of failing to get this cool system to work, I scrapped it and instead made a spaghetti code monstrosity that made magic circle run on a separate danger zone, and decided I’d make no more overlapping attacks. That’s easy; I just had to buffer the timing of the animation locks so that the Hero would always have time to move away. (I still wanted to keep the magic circle, since it’s fun for the player to try and trick the Hero with it.)

There’s my least pretty yet practical solo dev advice: if you get stuck because you can’t do something, you can certainly try to learn how to do it, but occasionally the only way to finish a project within a decade to work around those parts and let them be a bit crap.

I’m happy to use design trickery, writing and art to cover for my coding skills. Like, despite the anonymous asker’s description, the Hero’s dodging is actually far from perfect. I knew there was no way it was ever going to be, which is why I wrote special dialogue to account for a player finding an exploit that breaks the intended gameplay. (And indeed, when the game was launched, someone immediately found it!)

Regarding Godot

It’s lovely! I switched from Unity years ago and it’s so much simpler and more considerate of 2D games. The way its node system emphasises modularity has improved my coding a lot.

New users should be aware that a lot of tutorials and advice you find online may be for Godot 3. If something doesn’t work, search for what the Godot 4 equivalent is.

Regarding animation

I’m a professional animator, so my list of tips and techniques is a tad long… I’ll just give a few resource recommendations: read up on the classic 12 principles of animation (or the The Illusion of Life, if you’d like the whole book) and test each out for yourself. Not every animation needs all of these principles, but basically every time you’ll be looking at an animation and wondering how to make it better, the answer will be in paying attention to one or more of them.

Game animation is its own beast, and different genres have their own needs. I’d recommend studying animations that do what you’d like to do, frame by frame. If you’re unsure of how exactly to analyse animation for its techniques, youtube channel New Frame Plus shows an excellent example.

Oh, and film yourself some references! The Queen demanded so much pretend mace swinging that it broke my hoover.

Regarding pixel art

The pixel art style was picked for two reasons: 1. to evoke a retro game feel to emphasise the meta nature of the narrative, and 2. because it’s faster and more forgiving to animate in than any of my other options.

At the very start I was into the idea of doing a painterly style—Hollow Knight was my first soulslike—but quickly realised that I’d either have to spend hundreds of hours animating the characters, or design them in a simplistic way that I deemed too cutesy for this particular game. (Hollow Knight style, one day I’d love to emulate you…)

I don’t use a dedicated program, just Photoshop for everything like a chump. Pixel art doesn’t need anything fancy, although I’m sure specialist programs will keep it nice and simple.

Pixel art’s funny; its limitations make it dependent on symbolism, shortcuts and viewer interpretation. You could search for some tutorials on basic principles (like avoiding “jaggies” or the importance of contrast), but ultimately you’ll simply want to get a start in it to find your own confidence in it. I began dabbling years ago by asking for character requests on Tumblr and doodling them in pixels in whatever way I could think of.

Regarding environment assets

The Queen’s throne room consists of two main sprites—one background and one separate bit of the door for the Hero disappear behind—and then about fifty more for the lighting setup. There’s six different candle animations, there’s lines on the floor that need to go on top of character reflections, all the candle circles and lit objects are separated so that the candles can be extinguished asynchronously; and then there’s purple phase 2 versions of all of the above.

This is all rather dumb. There’s simpler ways in Godot to do 2D lighting with shaders and a built-in system (I use those too), but I wanted control over the exact colours so I just drew everything in Photoshop the way I wanted it. Still, it highlights how mostly you only need a single background asset and separated foreground objects; except if you need animated objects or stuff that needs to change while the game’s running, you’ll get a whole bunch more.

I wholeheartedly applaud having a go at making your own game art, even if you don’t have any art background! The potential for cohesion in all aspects of design—art, game, narrative, sound—is at the heart of why video games are such an exciting medium!

Regarding writing

Finding the voices of the Queen and the Hero was the quick part of the process. They figured that out they are almost as soon as writing started. I’d been mulling this game over in my mind for so long, I had already a specific idea in mind of what the two of them stood for, conceptually and thematically. When they started bantering, I felt like all I really had to do was to guide it along the storyline, and then polish.

What ended up taking so long was that there was too much for them to say for how short the game needed to be to not feel overstretched. Since I’d decided to go with two dialogue options on my linear story, it at least gave me twice the amount of dialogue that I got to write, but it wasn’t enough!

The first large-scale rewrite was me going over the first draft and squeezing in more interesting things for the Queen and the Hero to discuss, more branching paths and booleans. There was this whole thing where the player’s their dialogue choices over multiple conversations would lead them to about four alternate interpretations of why the Queen is the way she is. This was around the time I happened to finally play Disco Elysium, so of course I also decided to also add a ton of microreactivity (ie. small changes in dialogue that acknowledge earlier player choices) to cram in even more alternate dialogue. I spent ages tinkering with the exact nuances till I was real proud of it.

Right until the playtesters of this convoluted contraption found the story to be unclear and confusing. For some reason. So for my final rewrite, I picked out my favourite bits and cut everything else. With the extra branching gone, there was more room to improve the pacing so the core of the story could breathe. The microreactivity got to stay, at least!

A sample of old dialogue from the overcomplicated version:

Regarding completion

The question was “what kept me going to actually finish the game, since that is a point many games never even get to meet?” and it’s a great one because I forgot that’s a thing. Difficulties finishing projects, that is—I used to think it was hard, but not for many years. Maybe I’ve completed so many small-scale games already that it hardly seems that unreasonable of an expectation? (Game jams. You should do game jams.)

I honestly never had any doubt I was going to finish Mortholme. When I started in late autumn last year, I was honestly expecting the concept to be too clunky to properly function; but I wished to indulge in silliness and make it exist anyways. That vision would’ve been easy to finish, a month or two of low stakes messing around, no biggie. (Like a game jam!)

Those months ran out quickly as I had too much fun making the art to stop. It must’ve been around the time I made this recording that it occurred to me that even if the game was going to be clunky, it could still genuinely work on the back of good enough storytelling technique—not just writing, but also the animation and the Hero’s evolving behaviour during the gameplay segments which I’d been worried about. The reaction to my early blogging was also heartening. Other people could also imagine how this narrative could be interesting!

A few weeks after that I started planning out the narrative beats I wanted the dialogue to reach, and came to the conclusion that I really, really wanted it to work. Other people had to see this shit, I thought. There’s got to be freaks out there who’d love to experience this tragedy, and I’m eager to deliver.

That’s why I was fine with the project’s timeline stretching out. If attention to detail and artistry was going to make this weird little story actually come to life, then great, because that’s exactly the part of development I love doing most. Projects taking longer than expected can be frustrating, but accepting that as a common part of game dev is what allows confidence in eventual their completion regardless.

Regarding release

Dear anonymous’s questions didn’t involve post-release concerns, but it seems fitting to wrap up the post-mortem by talking about the two things about Mortholme's launch that were firsts for me, and thus I was unprepared for.

1. This was the first action game I've coded. Well, sort of—I consider Mortholme to be a story first and foremost, with gameplay so purposefully obnoxious it benefits from not being thought of as a “normal” game. Still, the action elements are there. For someone who usually sticks to making puzzle games since they’re easier to code, this was my most mechanically fragile game yet. So despite all my attempts at playtesting and failsafes, it had a whole bunch of bugs on release.

Game-breaking bugs, really obvious bugs, weird and confusing bugs. It took me over a week to fix all that was reported (and I’m only hoping they indeed are fully fixed). That feels slow; I should’ve expected it was going to break so I could’ve been faster to respond. Ah well, next time I know what I’ll be booking my post-release week for.

2. This was my first game that I let players give me money for. Sure, it’s pay-what-you-want, but for someone as allergic to business decisions as I am, it was a big step. I guess I was worried of being shown that nobody would consider my art worth financial compensation. Well, uh, that fear has gone out of the window now. I’m blown away by how kind and generous the players of Mortholme have been with their donations.

I can’t imagine it's likely to earn a living wage from pouring hundreds of hours into pay-what-you-want passion projects, but the support has me heartened to seek out a future where I could make these weird stories and a living both.

Those were the unexpected parts. The part I must admit I was expecting—but still infinitely grateful for—was that Mortholme did in fact reach them freaks who’d find it interesting. The responses, comments, analyses, fan works (there’s fic and art!! the dream!!), inspiration, and questions (like the ones prompting me to write this post-mortem) people have shared with me thanks to Mortholme… They’ve all truly been what I was hoping for back when I first gave myself emotions thinking about a mean megalomaniac and stubborn dipshit.

Thank you for reading, thank you for playing, and thank you for being around.

[sonicbattlelm]

Concept art for the games launcher, hope to see you checking out the game once Sonic Battle lost memories is out

[zoeticthoughts]

You know, I did some Lua bindings in C for an old mobile game (original Droid era). Godot supports C extensions via GDExtension.

Maybe it's possible to set up Lua bindings for Godot to make it easier to use?

Should I learn to make games with Löve or godot?

Disclaimer: I'm not super familiar with either, but I have done a couple days work in each

Probably Godot if you know programming already. Godot kinda drops you in GDScript and doesn't really explain how it works.

If you don't know how to program yet*, Love2d** might be easier to get started with, since you can just learn Lua, which is a very simple and easy language to learn. GDScript is basically Python, which is a little harder to learn. (not too much, it's also a very simple programming language... But compared to Lua, which is specifically designed to be easy to teach kids & non-programmers?).

This answer might change as the Godot documents and tutorial-landscape changes. It just feels like it'd currently be a bit of roadblock learning GDScript as your first programming language.

* my brain has so much trouble with the idea that "never learns to program" is a class of human that exists. I can't imagine. I imagine that seems pretty weird if you're not a programmer.

** as a person with a serious case of unicode perfectionism, it pains me that my current mobile keyboard can't type the ö***.

*** o with umlat or o with diaeresis? I think the answer is diaeresis, because Swedish.

[ayeforscotland]

Ad | Hi folks, I'd previously been getting into the swing of posting Humble Bundle deals and the charities they were helping. With any non-bundle purchases helping to raise money for Endometriosis research and support. Then Humble decided to outsource their partner program to a system called 'Impact' which has honestly been a massive pain to get my head round. Looks like I can't link to bundles directly and they only give me the above link to share.

There is currently:

The TellTale Games Bundle featuring Batman, the Expanse, the Walking Dead, the Wolf Among Us - Currently raising money for Save the Children

The Sid Meier Collection with every Civilization game and DLC I can think of - Raising money for Covenant House and Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research

Math for Programmers Book Bundle which contains a whole bunch of data science, cryptography and Python books - Raising money for Girls Who Code

Learn Unit Game Development Course - From Shaders to 3D to a course on Game Feel - Raising money for Oceana

Super Game Asset Bundle for Unreal, Godot, and Unity. Over 7000 audio, visual and environmental assets - Raising money for Direct Relief.

Not sure if this format is okay, it requires you to visit the link and navigate but hope it helps? Let me know.

[fuoridalcloro]

"Aspettare è una imposizione. Eppure è l'unica cosa che ci fa percepire fisicamente il logorio del tempo e ce ne fa conoscere le promesse. Esistono infinite forme di attesa: in amore, dal medico, alla stazione o nel traffico. Aspettiamo: l'altro, la primavera, i numeri del lotto, un'offerta, il pranzo, la persona giusta, e aspettiamo Godot. I compleanni, i giorni di festa, la felicità, i risultati sportivi, un referto. Una telefonata, il rumore della chiave nella toppa, il prossimo atto e la risata dopo il finale di una barzelletta. Aspettiamo che un dolore smetta e che ci colga il sonno o che il vento si plachi. Inerzia, distrazioni o noia: nel registro delle ore programmate, l'attesa è la pagina vuota da riempire. Che nel migliore dei casi ci ricompensa con la libert��."

Andrea Köhler - L’arte dell’attesa

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

I mentioned last night about tidying up the scrolling and general map look and this is the progress at lunch.

So far, I've tweeked the scroll speed of the layers to give it a more dynamic feel, moved the layers down slightly to give a distance feel and fixed the map layer rendering issue, so now all map and tile layers correctly show up.

Next, I'll be moving on to fix the animations which I feel like will require a new system to handle which animation is selected as there are multiple for each action.

Edit: I didn't know it would also record my music lol