Posted May 02, 2024 by Lethal Injection Games
So Recently over at the Lethal Injection Games Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/lethalinjectiongames) we decided to try a new format, one that we called "Minigame Monday" where the goal is to spend Mondays working are very small scoped and focused games for the sake of rapid iteration to try and learn new techniques and overall learn the Godot engine better as I am new to Godot coming from Unity and Unreal.
Overall the format was an astounding success and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to take a break from my flagship game to work on something different, and we did learn a lot as well.
For starters, I realized I do not know parts of the engine nearly as well as the language itself. Going back and just writing the movement for the starship was an ordeal in itself because I had done it once in my main game like 6 months ago AND I was doing a different kind of movement.
I will admit to that due to self imposed time constraints that I'm probably going to remove and just say when its done its done. I made some compromises in my code I wouldn't normally do. I had a few instances of a "$Sprite.<something> in my code really should have just been a variable I set at the beginning but it's not like that actually affects anything outside of annoying me by using poor practices.
I also made to sure to fully go over how component based programming works while I was streaming even though about half way through threw all logic into 1 class again for the sake of just getting it done. In a game as small as this one, no big deal. A game like Zomclave my primary game, a huge no no. Would not scale well at all.
So overall the only things I really regret are just poor coding practices in the game (again self imposed time that I'm removing for the future) and I feel like I had a missed opportunity here to go over the Signal Bus pattern since that's a thing I completely forgot about and actually would have been pretty helpful in this game. So I'll most likely find an excuse to implement that in the next game to show off how that works to my chat.
Final point I'd like to make regarding these games. They're going to have issues, they aren't perfect. They are essentially mini game jam games with the entire purpose to dev quick and learn things. I'm just putting them out in the world for the people who follow and support me to get to play the things I work on and is a nice hold over of content until I can starting getting builds of Zomclave. I look forward to the next Minigame Monday and we should have a new one in a few weeks.
Thanks again!
Jeff - Lethal Injection Games