Game Dev Blog

blog for my goat game in godot, a tower defense stat builder game with goats in it. better name for it pending. dev log in #dev log. all other random thoughts in #silliness

[goatgamedev]

3/4/25 Update (Alaine)!

I've been working on a cutscene engine. It's still in progress, but it is built entirely from parsing JSON files.

Perhaps this method is re-inventing the wheel a bit, but I'm having fun with it.

And...Cabrallero? I wonder who that could that be...

[goatgamedev]

11/7/24 Dev Log (Alaine)

It's been a bit! School picked up and I lost some motivation so there's been a hiatus. But my motivation is back o7

I've added these little translucent towers. I played around with shaders for a bit. I made an overlay filter and a screen filter. I ended up using the screen one!

[goatgamedev]

7/20 Big Update (Part 2)!

The Tower Defense Scene

Both Jose and I worked on this, so I'll indicate who did what.

Creation of a pause menu & pausing (Jose)

Game over screen (Alaine)

Reset button (Alaine)

Win screen (Jose)

Cannon texture (Alaine)

Additionally, Jose did some infrastructure work!

We now have an item JSON file (hooray!)

It goes along with an item class that Jose created as well.

[goatgamedev]

7/20 big update (Part 1)!

Sorry there haven't been updates in a bit! Progress is still being made!

Here's a compiled update!

The Stat Builder Scene

The work in this video was done by me (Alaine). The new stuff here is:

The stamina and EXP bars now show previews of what the selected job will do!

An inventory menu with tabs for types of items

A basic menu texture (likely will be changed later)

You can find the part 2 in the #dev log tag! (This contains the work on the Tower Defense scene, including Jose's work)

[goatgamedev]

6/27 dev log (Alaine & Jose)

(yes this is a day late, don't worry about it)

Jose's work:

Jose made the health bars! There's a more complex version of them (with a secondary healthbar) that we were considering, but it might end up being too cluttered for regular enemies, so it's staying simple for now.

Alaine's work:

I made the arrow towers rotate! I also added a moving hitbox for AOE attacks like the cannon, and added the game over screen (though the buttons on it do nothing yet...)

[goatgamedev]

6/26 dev log (Alaine)

Today I learned about shaders!

Made a simple shader that has a slider that as you increase the slider, it uses a noise texture to dissolve the enemy. I also added a CPU particle effect.

Also, I fixed it so the damage animation shows now.

Also, I made some more assets!

Behold, the wooden arrow tower! I'll probably try adding it to the game next.

[goatgamedev]

6/25 dev log (Jose)

Here's the work that Jose has done! Enemies now receive damage based on the towers that shot them, and when they receive enough damage they die & disappear!

(There's also a sprite that shows up when they're damaged, but it's buggy and needs to be fixed, more coming soon 👀)

[goatgamedev]

6/24 dev log (alaine)

it's a bit hard to tell what's going on in the video, but basically the MachineTower is an arrow tower that shoots once per second, and the other tower is a cannon tower that shoots an AOE every 5 seconds.

did some backend work (adding JSON files, classes, etc.) to get this to work. hopefully that means its scalable

i also made these goats. they need some edits for readability still, but i think they're cute. animation 2 will take a while if I do it for every goat...

so we'll see what i decide to do

[goatgamedev]

development crew update!

Hi! Alaine here! i've been the solo dev on this project for the past development logs, but a friend of mine has joined in!

his name is Jose, and from now on, I'll tag posts according to who did what

development logs may either be combined or separate, but i'll indicate who did what work in the post!

[goatgamedev]

goats

goats walking

[goatgamedev]

6/23 Dev Log

i strained my ankle (oops) but luckily coding is a sitting-down task, so the grind continues

i've created this little mini menu that lets you select which tower you're going to place. the tower sprite that actually gets put down doesn't change yet, but i've added a print statement & adjusted the global inventory values

since this is my 4th time having to instantiate and adjust the text of individual rows, i decided to make a more generic version of that. might go back and refactor some of the old code to use the newer version, we'll see

[goatgamedev]

6/20 dev log

Added a path so that enemies can walk along it :)

(as usual, none of the visual assets are mine, i got them from a pack on itch.io)

No collision yet, but I did implement some code to allow the angle & length of the towers to change via code (had to break out the ol' trigonometry).

i found an addon for nicer vision cones, but it's in GDScript, and I use C#. It's not too long so I'll probably just rewrite it to fit my code a bit better (i'll hold off on that, since I'm not sure what complexity of vision cones I'll need).

[goatgamedev]

6/19 dev log

if you saw me post this on the wrong blog, no you didn't

anyway, i've started the tower defense section!

i made a tilemap (using some pre-made assets), and you can move this little cursor around it (with both mouse and keyboard!)

clicking one of those dark green areas lets you place a tower. doesn't do anything yet, but it will soon...

[goatgamedev]

honestly a big motivator for me working on this project daily (hopefully) is the GitHub commit history

something very satisfying about seeing daily commits and the graphs and lines in the green. I’m getting a good grade in GitHub.

unfortunate that getting sick put a pause in my commit history 😔😔😔

[goatgamedev]

6/18 dev log

Fairly long, so it's below a read more :)

Added a little hover effect so you can see what kind of materials you're getting from the jobs. Used some asset packs I already had, I honestly might keep it as-is for those ones, since they're cute. We'll see.

This was surprisingly annoying to add. I thought it would be easier. I'm learning much about Godot's UI system.

Anyway, this menu updates so that you can actually make machines. They get added to an inventory dictionary.

You can see how increasing the number decreases the amount of materials you have...

(and, of course, decreasing the number you make increases your materials again)

[goatgamedev]

woah, doesn't this look fancy?

there's a good bulk in loadJSON that's actually shared between ALL json files...it felt so wrong and ugly to copy paste, but I needed unique behavior in each of those parse functions...

lo and behold, Actions. Do these count as lambdas? In any case, it makes me feel like a coder to do stuff like that...

is it good practice?

is it efficient?

does any of that really matter?

i never know

[goatgamedev]

on the subject of fancy, what about ternary operators?

often, my opinion of ternary operators are that they are harder to read and therefore make the code less clean, despite only using one line!

....however, it makes me feel cool to use them, because it all fits on one line...

[goatgamedev]

woah, doesn't this look fancy?

there's a good bulk in loadJSON that's actually shared between ALL json files...it felt so wrong and ugly to copy paste, but I needed unique behavior in each of those parse functions...

lo and behold, Actions. Do these count as lambdas? In any case, it makes me feel like a coder to do stuff like that...

is it good practice?

is it efficient?

does any of that really matter?

i never know