A place for experimentation

Background: 

Our team was working for the last 4 months on our isometric top-down sand box dungeon crawler. A variety of reasons led us to look into switching to Godot from Unity. 

We wanted to learn Godot. so what better way to learn fast than doing a game jam! I had seen the Cozy Autumn Jam last year, but couldn't participate, so I was excited to see it was right around the corner. We decided to make a top-down isometric something, and include as much learning as we could! 

Other team members have used Godot before, but it was brand new to me. Learning a new language, and development environment is like trying to give a lecture, where you constantly forget mid-sentence the next word you were going to say.

We pushed our comfort zone further with ambient music, painted artwork and a narrative.

Music:

Jamie is a wonderful musician who's compositions usually veer into the orchestral. It can be very difficult to pull back and do more minimalist songs and ambient sounds, so I challenged him to stretch himself in that way. He didn't start the music until he had a good idea of what the visuals of the game were going to turn out like, and succeeded in matching the simple storybook vibes.

Narrative:

We were considering adding more narrative elements to our main project, so I wanted to try having a dedicated writer on the team. We wanted to keep things simple, and we constantly had to be mindful of reducing the workload on the artist. We decided to use Ink because of it's versatility and being expandable, but mostly the dialogue and the plot planning was all done in a google doc.  Michel is a stealth writer. I have no idea how we spent a week on planning, and then magically over the course of one day he had 90% of the dialogue written out.

I wound up binding one main function for Ink to talk to Godot. We passed a command in at certain points of the dialogue to control things like the camera movement, who is speaking, handling items, and triggering object movement. Lots of objects listened to that signal, and decided if the command matched what they were listening for.
We didn't get a chance to fill out the dialogue all the way, but we are over 800 lines in Ink currently.

Ink sample: 

Art:

Christine, our artist has been working as a painting instructor, for the past year and a half, and we thought "if we are going to try new things, why not stray from pixel art?" Colored pencil or marker were considered, but she felt most comfortable with acrylic. She cut out some isometric diamonds to trace as a the ground to help here draw everything in the correct perspective. She has a great scanner, and scanned everything at 600 DPI and sent it over to me. 

Each asset, I used Gimp to cut out the white canvas, clean up the edges if needed, and make a 3 pixel edge of white-> transparency to help the assets blend in with what is behind it without changing any colors. I then scaled it to 24.75% of it's size, and saved each asset  and imported them into Godot, where I scaled it down again and put it into the game. We kept the scanner at 600 DPI and the scaling consistent so that everything would be proportional to the sizes it was painted.

Programming:

Not too much game logic was going on, but we needed to make all the connections to trigger events back and forth between Ink and Godot.

Godot's 2D physics, move-and-slide, and lerping were all very useful.

Shaders were used a lot! There was a shader that was responsible for tilting the character, a shader that would have been used on the shadows (if we had kept them) A shader for the white outline on items. 

Colin had provided a shader for the swaying of the grass, trees, and water. (as well as some good polish on the UI elements. )

Philip handled picking up and putting down items, catching and parsing out the inputs to game events. and animating the ending scene. Thanks to some questionable sleeping habbits, and time zone differences, there were a few days that I updated him on where I was with the programming on my way to bed, and we touched back up when I woke up on what he worked on all night while I slept. He put a lot of finishing touches on things, such as softening the shader movement to make it look more like paper, and less sudden (seen on the right):

I have kept a script called flatimations which does simple rotation and offsetting on a sine wave It is easy to adjust and can come up with a variety of different walking and bouncing visuals with mostly just 3 lines.

       angle += delta * speed

      get_parent().rotation_degrees=sin(angle)*lean

        get_parent().position.y = offsetY + cos(angle*2)*-1*jump

It was used for the walking and highlighting motions for everything.

SFX:

Jamie nailed the item pickup/put down sounds on the first try. I had put in a bloop for the dialogue that he liked enough to keep.
but so much time was spent trying to work on the walking sound of rustling leaves. it was iterated on 3 times. I don't think it is quite at 100% leafy fall goodness, but it is better than it was. For a good portion of the jam, the steps sounded like this:   >.<

Management:

Of course we had a fuzzy schedule to coordinate. There were a couple things like a more solid inventory system, or additional music layers that we didn't have time for, but mostly we achieved the scope we set at the beginning.

So much of my management job was keeping art as streamlined and simple as possible. We cut a lot from the narrative in order to maintain 8 max characters, and no more than 8 items. I was strict with still images, and no multiple frame animations. Our artist used up all of her free time on this, and finished up the last decorations one day before the submission deadline Everything she made was used, and nothing was done twice.  We had originally settled on a spooky ghost story set in a cafe, but interiors are heavy on the art assets, so the morning after the jam started, we pivoted to an outdoor adventure.

Drawing out a map early on helped the art and the narrative to understand what was where.

I couldn't be prouder of everyone's hard work, and after a well deserved break, I am excited to figure out what is next for us.

I hope you enjoyed our game, and may it be a relaxing break for you!