Take it or leave it: The Development Process

Original Idea: 

The original idea was to go with the theme provided in the jam called, "Lick it". Where you lick items, and if they were good, they would get points. If they lick something bad, they would lose a heart. After talking about it with my friend/artist, we realized that it might not have been interesting, so he brought up the idea of a drinking game.

Inspiration and motivation: 

Our inspiration was our emblem, with our crazy mascot doing a drinking game where he shoots you if you lose. The main inspiration was from the original idea/optional theme provided to us. Our motivation was that we wanted to make more games and gain more experience, so we could make better and more fun games. 

Challenges:

We had a couple of hiccups down the road. With both my friend and me having full-time jobs. Here's a list of a couple of issues we had:

1. Clip Studio Paint issues.
   • Problem 1: The app would merge things that shouldn't merge when expected.
   • Solution: My friend locked his cat out of the room to keep it from walking on the keyboard.
   • Problem 2: The app trial expired at the last week of the jam.
   • Solution: I used Aseprite to finish what was left to do.

1. Godot issues:
   • Problem 1: The app would randomly spam different functions or overwrite animations while running.
   • Solution: Made a bunch of global variables and booleans to make certain parts of code not run.
   • Problem 2: The performance on the web version was so bad that it would crash the browser.
   • Solution: I had to take out the pause menu functionality and a couple of shaders to make it run smoothly for the web version.

Proudest moments: 

Our proudest moment would be making time to get together to discuss designs, audio, and vocals. We were also very proud of publishing the game and getting many views from it. My personal proudest moment was being able to customize the dialogue add-on we used to fit the them and be customizable in the settings. 

What we learned: 

We learned many things. We learned:

1. How to focus on perspective when drawing characters or items.
2. How to properly use the process function in Godot.
3. How to make a basic shader material and use it.
4. Add-ons are heavenly.
5. Do not finish vocals with a week left before it was due.

Post-Jam plans: 

We plan to add more game modes that include an endless mode, and at least one more, based on what we can come up with. We would like to update the vocals to be random for the goblin so he does not annoy anyone with repeated lines. As the developer writing this... I should know that this is not fun, hearing one of the repeat lines... We also plan to make the game downloadable so anyone can download and enjoy the game whenever and however they want. 

Last words: 

If you have any ideas of things you would like to see fixed in the game or new modes you would like to see in the future of the game, please leave your comment on the game. We would love to hear your opinions. 

Thanks for reading. 

ShotgunGoblinStudios