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My Gamedev Journey thus Far

A topic by blueapollo created Mar 19, 2025 Views: 157 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 4

Hello there!

I would just like to share my gamedev journey on the first game I made, while promoting here. Wandering Soul is a randomized dungeon crawler, where you fight monsters, get stat upgrades, and get a highscore based on how long you last. I started conceptualizing this game way back February 2023, after watching a Godot tutorial from Heartbeast (you should definitely check his channel out). This game is heavily inspired by that tutorial and most of the base scripts are from there as well. Huge thanks to him, of course! I started this game as a way to learn how Godot works, and to showcase my monster pixel art. Coding was the hardest part for me, as I have no background with it prior on doing this. During my first tries I managed to learn the importance of the copy and paste command. Though, overtime I gotten better in asking the forums for help, and that's where I discovered the beautiful community of Godot on gamedev.

Life got busy after that and I wasn't able to work on it much so I got to release the first version on June 2024. I've finished most of the features I want (and can do), and published it along with a trailer and a little bit of marketing. Awesome people left some useful feedback on my little game, and I managed to implement them within a month. During those time, I really felt like a game developer. Listening to feedback, and figuring out how to implement them. All that stuff. It really felt good.

After that's done, I decided to leave it and move on to other projects. Unfortunately, nothing clicked. I still had trouble with coding, and most of my ideas were ambitious where I get stuck trying to implement a feature then just gave up on everything eventually. It was only during this year when I decided to get back on Wandering Soul to implement a feature that should have been there when I first released it. I tried my best to figure everything out, this time all on my own. And it was exhilarating, specially when I finally figured out how to make it work. Only then did I fully understand why I wanted to do this in the first place, and probably why everyone's so passionate about game development. The feeling of identifying a problem and finding the best solution is unmatched. Seeing things work after meticulous testing does something in my brain I can't fully explain. One thing is for certain though, I'm only in the beginning of my journey and I'll continue making games.

Anyway, thank you for reading all that. I just want to share my experience with this awesome community, and you can share yours too if you like.

Let's keep on making those games!

I definitely feel you on getting stuck on a problem and giving up on the whole project because of it, and yes when you finally break through it's very satisfying. I did a similar thing to what you described with a project where I realized the basic player movement was just not that much fun, it was cool in theory but too complex and annoying for what I wanted to create (an easy to pick up arcade game). Instead of reworking it, I just moved on to other projects. Finally after like a year, I had this realization that if I didn't go back to finish my half-completed projects NOW then I would never do it. So I jumped back in to this game and totally changed the way it controls.... then still didn't like it and changed it again and finally am satisfied with it. Funny thing is, the most simple and straightforward method was the one that worked for me. It was definitely a "why didn't I do this in the first place" moment. But hey that's how we learn!

Figuring that out must have been thrilling. I fully agree, sometimes we need to face challenges in order to learn. Thank you for sharing.

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Ambitious ideas that you lack the ability to pull off. Or as a lot of people call it 'scope creep'. It's good to push boundaries but don't set unrealistic goal posts that are way to far away. Everybody has been there at some point. 


It's always good to walk away for a short period then come back with fresh eyes down the track. Good luck with your endeavours. I'll add your games to my collections.

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Thank you! I'm still in the process of learning, and avoiding scope creep is a hard one to learn for sure. Thank you for checking my game out, glad that you liked it as well.

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Actually Wandering Soul looks really cool. Very much like old Might & Magic/ Wizardry. It fits perfectly in my First person dungeon crawler collection.