Posted May 26, 2025 by berrylly
#gamejam
12/5/25 first day!
today i thought about what 'journey home' means to me personally. my fond memories of going home are late night journeys in the car, playing my gameboy until it ran out of battery and having to find other ways to entertain myself. i wanted to take that nostalgic feeling and make it into a game. i decided on the name 'one night' with the full title being "one night during your childhood your parents carried you to your bed from the car after a long journey and you had no idea this would be the last time it would ever happen" because i love that bittersweet nostalgia. i have a rough idea of the ending scene, which would be sounds of getting carried to bed with closed captions, and an end screen of a childhood bedroom.
13/5/25
because i have little to no experience coding i decided to follow a tutorial. i watched a video by Coding With Russ on how to make Dino Run in Godot, because i thought it would be a good jumping off point to make the game i imagined. using my own images became an issue when i ran into problems because of differing file names, dimensions and things I wanted to add or take away from the game. despite getting a lot of help from Vurj and learning a lot, by the end of the night i decided to start my project again and use the same assets as in the video. i plan to change them once i'm done so at least i'll have more knowledge by then and may find it easier to fix any problems.
14/5/25
i followed the tutorial exactly and had a LOT less issues. if you're new to game dev i highly recommend not changing anything while following a tutorial.
18/5/25
today i drew a background and cleaned up the rail. i made custom leaf stamps in aseprite for the bushes. im proud of the sky, it's accurate even down to the brightness of stars and you can even find constellations - i tried to make them accurate to how i would see them on my car rides home from my childhood but i am a beginner astronomer so if i made a mistake please tell me!
i added a jump spin with godots animation which made it feel way more fun and 'dynamic'
i looked for copyright free music but found so much AI slop that i felt nervous about even using any free music. i decided to go for atmospheric sounds instead.
i also ended up recolouring the sprite. i did plan on making my own character but i got too attached to the dinosaur and didn't want to delete them..
today was the first time it really felt like the game was actually coming together :3
19/5/25 half way!
i spent a long time trying to fix the ground bug, it wouldn't scroll properly and the image kept jumping. i cleaned up the bushes and removed the objects from the tutorial, but i had to hide them instead of actually removing them because somehow the whole game breaks if i remove the invisible load bearing barrel lol.
21/5/25
i collected some sounds and put them together to make the ending scene. ive never used audacity before and was struggling with getting little pops every time i stitched sounds together. i found a 10 year old youtube comment that told me to how to use the repair feature, so thank you MinecrafterJCB1. it was pretty fun to imagine the ending and try to match up the sounds to it. it was at this point i decided to scrap the idea for the bedroom scene at the end.
25/5/25 last day!
i went to comic con over the weekend so had a few days where i couldnt work on the game. on the last day of the jam some friends playtested the game and i got their input on how long the game should be before the cutscene triggers. i made it quite a bit shorter because they are gamers and i wanted it to be more accessible to the general public, lol. the ending scene was made using godots animation feature.
26/5/25 thoughts!
i really regretted using the tutorial i did, and needed to ask for a lot of help. i think for future game jams i will follow a tutorial directly without changing anything, rather than thinking of an idea first and trying to find a specific tutorial that will work as a base. i think the issue is when you're so new, you don't know what tutorials are good and which ones arent until you try them (and even then its not obvious until someone points it out) so next time i'll just go for a super popular tutorial. i ran into a lot of trouble because the code felt VERY inflexible and impossible to expand upon. every single thing in the game is based off screen size and the size of the sprits and the ground, so i couldn't change a sprite by even one pixel without everything breaking!!! i really dont recommend altering a tutorial unless you have someone experienced to help you, and luckily i did. thank you vurj!!
i really enjoyed writing a devlog this time, it's nice to look back on and i really recommend other people do it!