Background

I’m an embedded software engineer with ~8 years of experience working on software used in telecommunication equipment. I always had a passing interest in game development/game design, but I never took a serious attempt at actually making a game. Now that I have some experience in making software, I’ll try to get into making games. I’m creating this blog series to document my journey, share my wanderings, mistakes, successes. I’ll be using the Godot engine to do my experiments in. I won’t following any complete project tutorial (we need no stinking manual over here!), I’ll try to make do with the documentation and experience from an almost entirely unrelated area of software engineering. I have a feeling it’s going to be fun.

First steps

Ok, so let’s get started. At this point I don’t have any actual project in mind, I’ll only play around with prototypes for a while and see what sticks. Shopping list:

• Game engine - check
• Some assets to see actually display
• Something idea to implement

I’m not a game industry veteran, not by a longshot, but I heard that if your game is fun it’s also fun with triangles shooting at rectangles. I don’t want to use a pre-made asset pack, so let’s make some basic shapes:

Not much, but for quick prototyping it’s more than enough. I also created a starry space background, as this first prototype will be a “spaceship” “game”. Mind the quotes. The assets were created in pixelorama. We can check out the assets from shopping list.

Now, onto the idea. Let’s make a simple spaceship game. Fly around in 2D space, Newtonian motion (i.e. keep moving until acted upon), no friction. For the first iteration, it’s only going to handle forward/reverse thrust and rotation. After a couple of hours tinkering, reading the documentation, drawing assets, it’s looking like this:

I also threw in some “asteroids”, just for good measure (the read squares if it’s not obvious to the untrained eye). The exhaust plume is generated by a GPU particle emitter node. Some other features:

• the spaceship shoots bullets
• the bullets deal damage to the asteroids
• asteroids can be destroyed
• the asteroid are spawned randomly (though pretty badly as of now)

A short demo:

Forgive the quality and shortness of the image, I’m still figuring out how to publish this blog/journal/whatever this ends up being.

About the asteroid spawning: it’s currently uniformly distributed, with no regards to collision in the spawned asteroids. That will have to be made smarter in the future. That’s about it for my first week of game development experiments. This took about a week, spending ~1 hour per day on the project.