Posted January 05, 2024 by IIPedro
#release
Hey there! I'm IIPedro, and even though my account is new and my only game is a prototype, I've been making games and developing, overall, for about a year and a half. As to how many of my projects have reached the light, well, this is the first one. For the most part, I've been fiddling around with Godot 4 ever since the betas on 2D projects, 3D prototypes, VR tech demos, you name it. Yet, the first one I'm releasing is this one, and still, I almost didn't publish it! Maintaining a project is something that requires a lot of passion, free time and dedication. Ever since I started coding, I told myself I'd only release a project if I were sure I wouldn't just abandon it (just like my 20 previous archived projects). It would be a pity to release a prototype just for people to see that the last time it was updated was who knows how many years ago, without any sign of where the developer might be. But alas, here I am releasing a prototype (with many rough edges) without the certainty that I'll be able to maintain it. I guess I might be doing the exact same thing I promised myself not to. Anyway, this post it about the project, so let's get to it.
I always knew that a large project would be vastly different than a prototype, but not at this level. Most of my previous projects (those 20 other ones I was talking about earlier) were simply tech demos of me exploring the capabilities of frameworks I enjoyed (mostly Godot 4, though). Every so often I'd get excited to test a new feature or idea, then make a project based on it, code all over the place without any sense of organization and abandon it afterwards. Although doing this is absolutely not recommended for big projects, it worked just fine for prototypes and made me learn a lot about how to code and the intricacies of the engine or framework I was building upon.
Yet, it was just a matter of time regarding when I would become unsatisfied and try a big project, and I'm afraid to tell you the time for that has come. All of my previous prototypes were small ones, so it would be fair to start with a small scale project, and so I did. A simple game with simple mechanics built upon a simple concept with a simple art style. Nothing could go wrong.
Or so I thought...
At early stages, I made the exact same mistake I always made. Bad organization. Just so you have an idea, the prototype version before this one released on Itch had the entire main UI on a single scene (basically an organization layer) with a single script (that means a single coding file). That's one organization layer for the ENTIRE MAIN MENU! Obviously, it was a bad idea and I had to refactor everything (which took me a lot of time, without a doubt). Besides, this horrible organization led to lots of stack overflows and hours of debugging. If I could do something differently from the start, it would be organizing stuff better. Not that I had previous experience on organizing...
At least, making oversimplified vector art sprites and relying on a minimalist style could hide my complete laziness on the organization aspect. Game design went on smoothly and I had a few testers telling me about design flaws and bad choices. I really enjoy receiving feedback, so if you have the time to do so, please leave a short comment about the project. I'll do my best to improve stuff! Besides, one of the main factors that I thought would be a diminishing one, motivation, was the strongest positive one. Once the project started to gain traction, I loved developing on this prototype.
Exporting was also a breeze. I initially decided this would be an Android-only game because I didn't want to deal with platform-specific issues. Relying on an HTML export helped a lot since I could export to ALL platforms with a single click! Not really though, Apple products made me build the entire export template (what allows me to export to HTML) in order to make it load, at minimum. But hey, now I can proudly tell you that my project at the bare minimum loads on an iPhone (with a LOT of bugs and broken functionality, don't take this as a guarantee that it'll work flawlessly on iOS)!
I've been working on this prototype for about two weeks (ever since about Christmas eve), and I can safely tell you that I had lots of fun, faced some challenges and pulled many all-nighters trying to fix that one annoying bug. Yet, seeing a smile when somebody played my game made all of those nights worth it, because that one person was satisfied with the project I poured my heart into. As to if this game will still receive constant updates and as frequently as development has been until now, I can't guarantee that. I'm still afraid I'll abandon this just like I did with all those other projects. However, without a doubt I learned a bunch with this one, and I'm very proud to be releasing it (even though on a prototype stage)! I really hope, from the bottom of my heart, that you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed developing it! The possibility of adding new features is there, I just haven't gotten to it yet, and don't know if I ever will. Until then, I guess we'll see each other in the next devlog, if it ever sees the light. Thank you so much for reading this much, and see ya later (hopefully)!