Lessons Learned

What a wild week this has been.

I have tinkered with programming games in multiple languages since about 2012 and have done a bunch of different "build your first game in..." projects. From the beginning to around last year, I have excelled in the understanding of the languages and been able to pretty quickly pick up the different nuances and done the projects well. I have coded additional components to some of them and played with others. 

But when it came to going "beyond", I fell short. It sucked. To know that you could be good at something but lack a key component at getting to the next step sucks. A lot. I hated it. I almost gave it up after I used Python to essentially make a simulator based on a game that my brother and I played when we were younger. I had tried my best and done something and it was time to move on. 

Then, I got back into Minecraft. I started using the in-game Java to code different events and builds and crazy stuff. Then I was working with Visualforce at my job (basically Javascript) with HTML and CSS. Then I got a new job where I use "Talend Studio" to create integrations from different data sources into Salesforce. Suddenly, programming was something I was doing a bunch of programming and logic in different systems. I wondered if I should give game development another chance. 

That was when Unity self-destructed in a weird monetization grab and people suddenly started talking about Godot, an engine I had been curious about, a lot more. I figured, what could it hurt to check it out? I wanted to take another stab at coding and Godot seemed interesting and was a hot topic (so I knew there would be tutorials to check out). 

That was when I took the simulator project I had built over the course of 3 months in Python and replicated and vastly improved it in a week and a half. Suddenly, it was more JRPG than simulator and had animation (which I had never cracked a single time before). I wondered if I could do more.

I looked into different Godot discussions and found the Godot Wild Jam that was going to start in a few days and figured I'd join. And boy, am I glad I did.

For the first time in my life I have created a game. It may not necessarily be a great game or a visually stunning game or even a very long game, but it is a complete game by itself. It has dialogue, it has animations, it has levels. Honestly, if this were the 90s, it would be a pretty solid game. And I built it in less than the available 10 day window. From never having built a game to building one by myself (with some help asset-wise and a tutorial), is incredibly empowering.

I feel that I have learned so much about game development and my own skills in this jam. I honestly did not know if I would ever build a game, even though that had been a dream of mine since I was 3 years old, playing Super Mario World. Now I have a game and I have it published for anyone in the world to play. It's exciting.

The Godot documentation available online and the community providing discussions, tutorials, and solutions, is amazing. There are so many ways to learn so many different aspects of the engine, and they are useful.

All that being said, I have learned a few things over the last week-ish that I plan on carrying over to future Jams and game development projects.

First and foremost, planning is very important. Sure it was cool to follow along with a tutorial to build something. But I ended up using like 5% of the code/information learned and built a lot of additional components. I should have followed the tutorial and then started  my own project instead of cannibalizing it into my project. The amount of time it took me to convert from a single "Tower"/"Decoration" in the tutorial system to making a "Decoration" class_name and then inheriting functions and properties from there was a slog. If I had of planned it out from the start it would have made the whole process a lot easier.

Along with planning comes organization. The tutorial was pretty good about how to organize the game components and resources to make sure that everything worked copasetic. However, I feel like those lessons went in one ear and out the other until the 13th hour and I needed organization to make things work correctly. Then I was filing components and resources and scenes into weird paths so that they would fit a structure that I should have organized from the start. I wasn't able to make a "return to menu" button because it didn't reset the game, just literally put you in the main menu, and then "Start Game' returned you to whatever place you were. If I had of planned the different screens (Main Menu, Main Game, Game Over) from the beginning, it would have been as simple as instantiating a new scene or wiping some variable. But instead, I just had to leave it that you start the game, and you end the game. 

I also got to try out making pixel art for the first time, which was a lot of fun. I always thought I would be bad at it, since I'm bad at drawing. However, it turns out, I'm pretty decent. I only made a few different components, but I felt like it was easy/intuitive and I came out with a product that I was (mostly) proud of. Not too bad for my first attempt. I think I would be willing to try harder and go more in-depth in future animation endeavors. Something I never would have known prior to this jam.

All in all, I love the documentation for Godot and the ease of accessing the needed documentation quickly within the engine. Being able to right click a class and have the documentation appear within the engine was a godsend. I don't know how many times I looked through all the different node types and methods/properties to determine the one that would best suit my needs for the situation. But every time, I felt like I had almost all the answers I needed just from that. The engine is so intuitive and user-friendly. Enough so that it has finally allowed me to stop dreaming of being a game developer: I am one now.