Groovy Game Grotto

Timeline of my journey in game development as I take it semi-seriously! Check #devlog tag for all of my game dev stuff #TALESOFMAGIGAME #SHOTSFIREDGAME #projectMAGI Other Socials!

[kofisgrotto]

Quick update on the player character HUD since I had quite the fun implementing it!

[kofisgrotto]

2023 / 11 / 15

Improved a lot of things since the last update

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I think it's safe to say that the project is pretty much playable on a very rough level!

Apart from numerous basic features like menus, progression, and saving to name a few, the very bare minimum prototype is already intact!

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LIST OF UPDATES MADE

Dynamic camera

Dialogue system

Basic combat mechanics

Enemy behavior

Background processes (stats to name one)

Basic UI

Music (mostly placeholder)

[kofisgrotto]

2023 / 10 / 29

WE ARE SO BACK!

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After an unannounced break from game development (due to personal stuff and college), I've played with Godot a bit more and was able to put this up!

Building off of Magi, I'm attempting to make it more organized and modular so I can easily work on it in the long run.

[kofisgrotto]

2023 / 09 / 16

Mostly added a way for the player to lose after taking a certain amount of hits! Added some animations on the side too.

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Decided to display HP as a percentage instead of an integer numerical value to really give the feel of a ship rather than an RPG character

[kofisgrotto]

SHOTS FIRED # 3

2023 / 09 / 15

I've changed the vision for the game, and made the player to have more limited movement! Past concepts involved various rooms (or areas) but I believed it to be quite unfeasible for this project, so I opted for one room only!

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This isn't the latest build of the project, but just also wanted to dedicate this post to inform about the change. So far, the game's going smoothly, and will add more stuff soon

[kofisgrotto]

TALES OF MAGI # 2

2023 / 09 / 11

Wanted to share some designs from Magi's far descendant hundreds of years after his existence!

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I created a mood board to have a one-stop place for what designs I could inspired at when creating this design

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I attempted creating him through a vector-based program, and I seem to have wasted more time trying to figure out Affinity Designer rather than just drawing him by hand in another art program. Lesson learned, I suppose!

I also decided to work with a smaller and more pixelated screen which would render the properties of vector useless. Seems like a waste of time learning all this, but I could still use it for environments and stuff in the future!

[kofisgrotto]

TALES OF MAGI # 1

2023 / 09 / 10

I seem to be shuffling from project to project, but it seems that will be the case as I continue to learn the many features of Godot and its scripting language. Corresponding projects will be tagged accordingly! Feel free to click them on my profile to see them grouped neatly!

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For this blog, I've implemented a debug room for this project to better test out anything that I might find interesting before implementing in the main game.

To replace random battles, I've decided to implement interactable enemies in the overworld that will initiate a battle if the player gets in contact with an enemy.

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Consider this a reboot of MAGI: THE LOST as I believe that project is quite messy as it is now.

[kofisgrotto]

SHOTS FIRED # 2

2023 / 09 / 06

Implemented an enemy this time! Will improve the animations by next post!

[drdevguy]

Stay Silent Devlog 8

Cosmetics!

woah some funny cosmetics

suggest some and i might add it!!

i dont really have much other news than check out demo 2 RIGHT NOW!!! because i still need some more feedback and i also want to thank like everyone for the support this game has gotten (specifically on other sites im on and stuff lol :p ). it seriously is really awesome seeing a fanart for this game already and like ajfheifbrirjebfjcir ITS REALLY AWESOMEE!! also back to talking about the game uhhh, im not sure if i will do demo 3 and i might actually just focus on releasing the game with a final build instead of another demo, maybe demo 3 might be for private testers or whatever idk! the final release will definitely have a lot to offer so be on the look out for when i post anything new!! :))

anyways....

Have a great weekend!! Said the troll face

[kofisgrotto]

SHOTS FIRED # 1

2023 / 09 / 05

Decided to make a fresh new project from scratch (still unsure of the name) mostly to try out object pooling, especially with the bullets. You can see it being tested in the video.

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As of now, I do not have any crazy visions for this project, but I do have some mechanics in mind that I will try out soon.

At the very minimum, this will be a roguelike shooter (original idea, I know!), and I'm looking forward to see how this little project will evolve.

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I DO have something in mind where the player would have cards that you can cycle through that could give player buffs, enemy debuffs, skills, and the like but I do not want to get ahead of myself! I'll eventually show it when I do implement it.

[scootydevlogs]

[PBH Log #3] Just For Consistency

September 5th, 2023

Hi! Am powbrick!! I already forgot how I wrote the intro on my last update!!! Anyways here's the footage of the week!!!!

(music suggestion by @spoderluks)

Unfortunately I got sick for half the week and couldn't find the drive to update many visuals as planned, so this will be a short update.

--- Godot Icon -> Peanut Bag

So long, pal. You did great work.

Angle-wise could make sense to animate Vincent kicking the bag at the gang (than throwing at them).

If they get more peanuts they likely wouldn't care

--- Some Shader FX

While I darkened the tile colors, I also added a gradient and played around with the table shadow using Godot's shader.

I went a lil crazy with this a while back lol

(Also I had to replace the mosaic shader with yam in the recent build because render order-wise it conflicted with the bg shader)

(Emphasis on the "had to".)

--- Reworked the Emitter System

I won't get too much into this, but the next thing on the gameplay to-dos were sub-patterns. This way I could expand the creative bounds with the pattern attacks (in short, be more cruel to the player). I thought it wouldn't take long, but turns out the implementation in the last build wasn't ideally structured for sub-patterns, so I ended up re-coding majority of the emitter code.

No obvious feature is shown, but hoping the time I spent on this is well worth it in the long run.

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Generally I will note down Next Goals here, however I am tired today and next week will also be slow since I'm goin on a short vacation so we will see what gets done lol

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Thanks for reading and see ya next update!

[kofisgrotto]

September 2, 2023 (Log 11)

ITCH.IO page now viewable!

It's not a complete product, but I think I got the basics out there. I've definitely learned a lot and I don't want to spend more time on this prototype.

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Feel free to check the prototype here if you wanna try it out!

This will be a fairly short devlog as I want to take a quick break haha, thanks for viewing!

[kofisgrotto]

August 31, 2023 (Log 10)

I am aware it's already September, but I wasn't able to post this yesterday!

Just wanted to update y'all that the prototype is almost finished!

By that, I meant the bare minimum of the gameplay loop has been implemented. Though, still lacking many features that a full game would have, I'd say I can use this prototype for an actual game in the near future.

Other than that, just wanted to show this title screen I was able to put up for the game, as I prepare a blog soon that would show some gameplay of the prototype.

I might put this up on itch.io just to get my profile there going and for other people to be able to try this prototype out.

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Stay tuned for more future updates! Thank you ~

[kofisgrotto]

August 29, 2023 (Log 9)

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Basic gameplay loop of the game has been implemented!

Overworld to battle switch has been successfully done! Now I just need to make the player stats consistent from switching screens.

I was finally able to wrap my head around instancing which I've had plenty of trouble with in the past (and even today to some degree), but I made sure to document my learnings in a personal notepad that I can visit anytime.

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While I'm here it's time to talk about

THE GAME ITSELF (or the prototype...)

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Welcome to Project MAGI!

An RPG where you play as a wizard! Walk around in the overworld for long enough and you'll be greeted with plenty of random encounters (like old-school RPGs).

You will then be greeted into a 2D first-person shoot-em-up where battles happen in real-time and enemies can also attack in real-time with various projectiles and attack patterns. For now, the primary attack is through shooting projectiles at you.

Dodge by actively moving your mouse cursor to avoid enemy attacks.

I have provided general descriptions in the images to give a basic overview of what they are talking about. Continue reading if you'd like the more detailed explanations of the concept.

General Information about Project MAGI

Battle encounters will happen randomly. With an encounter calculation that I've borrowed from Final Fantasy VI.

Battles are not turn-based. They play out in real-time to encourage active participation from the player while rewarding skilful play through active bonuses. Like tech points in the first Kingdom Hearts game.

The battle area was intentionally made to be small to give enemies a chance to attack without getting damaged by the player, especially with special enemies and bosses.

Stuff I'm still unsure about...

Whether to add elemental mechanics in the game or not.

Ultimately I decided to go with sun (Solar) and moon (Lunar) type of attacks to keep elemental management to a minimum, but this may be subject to change.

For a bit of story premise, I'd like to think that the wizard lost his melee license as it was stolen by someone leaving him with only his magic license (hence, the shooting magic mechanic).

Related to the point above, I am not sure if I should go with a license-centered combat or sun-and-moon-centered combat.

Still debating whether battles would happen at random or not, but I'm leaning towards random battles for lots of surprises in the overworld!

Combos! Namely the combo pattern STUN -> STAGGER -> TUMBLE -> OVERWHELM whic is very akin to the various combos presented in the Xenoblade Chronicles franchise.

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With all that said! I think this is it for this log, and I am quite pleased with the development of this prototype as it is going smoother than anticipated. I still have to keep my ambitions and expectation in check since I do not want to overwhelm myself with the goals of making a full game when I'm just creating a prototype.

Thank you for giving this long post a read! I'll definitely post more progress logs in the future about the prototype!

[kofisgrotto]

August 27, 2023 (Log 8)

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Apologies for a few days of silence, but I got quite hooked in this new idea I've come up with for a game, and needless to say, it's going quite smoothly (with few bugs here and there).

Here's a screenshot of the current prototype I'm working on, and gave more effort to the graphics to make it look more appealing to look at.

A screenshot from a few days ago

The plan for this prototype (which will be named Project MAGI, for the sake of it) is to just provide players one room, one (or two) enemies, and one skill at most! Concept of the game will be further elaborated in a future post.

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For this log, I'd like to highlight the stuff I've learned throughout the development of this game!

Scene switching (using autoloads which can save player's position and stats)

Progress bars (UI stuff, especially HP)

Parallax Scrolling

Plenty of UI elements (apart from progress bars

Simpler state machines (at least for this project) and...

Shader implementation! ... mostly copy-pasted though lol

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I also have a dedicated Twitter account (@Kofikrumble_YT) for microblogs and stuff!

Mini Posts will be more frequent there at the cost of organization while this blog will stay as pristine as ever!

Thank you so much for taking the time to read, and I'll upload more about this project soon

[kofisgrotto]

August 24, 2023 (Log 7)

Forgot to share this in previous posts but here's the concept of the game I've been visualizing in my head for a long while now.

After a good chunk of time spent in developing the prototype, I've come to the realization that the scope of it may be too big for me considering I'm still a beginner.

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Notable mistakes I've noticed and come across:

Visualizing a 3D-ish game on a 2D workspace was a bit tricky to work with.

State machines made spawning enemies buggy. Coupled with signals and plenty of functions made the use of state machines a double-edged sword for me as a beginner.

Prototypes usually take around 2-3 days but I ended up spending more than a week and the main mechanics are not even implemented very well.

The scope of the project was too big for me, even if I thought it wasn't.

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The biggest realization of all is having to let go of the project.

After a retry and more bugs later on, having not enough knowledge of the game engine and programming in general made this prototype a large roadblock for me. And because of thus, I've come to the decision to finally let go of the project and come up with a more feasible idea.

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It sucks (really!), but that's not to say I didn't learn anything from these past weeks of game development because I definitely learned a lot of the basics! This moment may be at the lower end of the gane development rollercoaster but it's necessary to make the peak even more rewarding.

I will not make this longer than it needs to be but...

TL;DR The project will be scrapped for now in favor of a more realistic and smaller projects that I can do within my skills and knowledge. Thank you for reading and have a good day!

[kofisgrotto]

Project: Bloom (Log 6)

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Got a bit used to using state machines in the project, and it did take a while to implement

Needless to say, it did organize and streamline how I can be able to add more actions to game objects. Like...

Following the player at a certain distance

Following the silo (or tower) if player is out of range

Disregarding the player if the enemy is close to the silo (to destroy it!)