Hello everyone!
First of all, sorry if this is in the wrong category- I looked at general and help sections, but they didn’t seem like the right place to post this.
After playing games for most of my life, I finally decided to dip my toes into gamedev, even if just casually. My experience with coding and designing is close to 0 - I played around a bit with PS1 RPGMaker about 3 decades ago, but otherwise I’m as green as it gets. I started with KidsCanCode tutorial, and tried to add some stuff on top of it, and after a bit more than a week (I can only spare a few hours a day at max to this new hobby) I ended up with this variation that seems to finally work
I tried to only stick to basics that I understood and that made sense to me- if/elif, show/hide, groups, timers etc.- and stayed away from all the fancy stuff like particles or shaders, as even YouTube tutorials left me confused more than anything. Got to learn how to walk before you can dance I guess
At this point, I think I understand the bare basics of moving objects and their interactions with each other, and will probably move on to try and make a basic tower defence game to learn more about pathfinding and target acquisition etc.
I’d appreciate any kind of feedback- or suggestions, as people in my real life circle are only interested in FIFA, COD or Fortnight, and wouldn’t touch anything that doesn’t look AAA
EDIT: itch widget doesn’t seem to work, so I just added a link to web page instead
Hi !
It’s a good first game, congratulations!
I think it’s a good idea to continue with relatively simple game genres (2D tower defense) to learn quietly without encountering discouraging difficulties.
As long as you keep your morale and motivation, it should do it!
hi! thanks for sharing here :3 I gave it a play , it was nice. a bit fast paced but that worked well, imo.
I dont really have any ‘constructive/ improvement’ feedback, sadly. other than saying it played smoothly.
@sutemos That’s a great little shooter, quite addictive too! If that’s your first game, I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next. Keep up updated plz!
That’s a very nice little shooter. If you wanted to take it further I’d like to see a high score table, game pad support, sfx when the enemies are destroyed and more enemy types / power ups. But that’s only if you want to take it further. It’s a very accomplished and robust first step. Cheers.
Thank you for all the positive replies you guys! I’m really looking forward to sharing my attempt at tower defence as soon as it starts to look like a game and not just a mash up of random objects on screen I wish my progress was faster, but having a full time job- and a night shift one at that- leaves me with little time to spare apart from the weekends.
That being said, so far I find the whole game dev affair to be very addictive- and my PlayStation game time is paying the price for it As for the progress, once I finish the UI, the core of the game will be done. I already have the core game loop working pretty well, but will probably need to add a few more tower and enemy types with a bit of a different behaviour, because so far I just focused on 1 type of tower and 1 type of enemy.
My biggest challenge and headache atm is my stupid idea not to rely on 3rd party assets anymore and draw everything myself. I genuinely thought learning to code will be the hardest part, but now I’m spending ~70% of my project time in LibreSprite and it honestly feels like I have 2 left hands. As irritating and time consuming as it is, it actually feels really good to see my own drawings come to life and not look horrible.
Once again, thank you guys for all the kind words and I hope I will be able to share my progress in next few weeks
Sorry for double posting, but I didn’t want to make a new topic just to post some updates.
It took me a bit longer than I initially thought- mostly because of the easter weekend, where I didn’t even turn my laptop on- but I finally have a working tower defence game.
Drawing my own sprites was more stressful than I imagined, so I decided to rely on 3rd party assets for SFX. Maybe someday I’ll get to the point where I make my own SFX, but that’ll be a long time from now
I used How to make Tower Defense game in 10 minutes tutorial by AJ08Coder as a base and build my project from there. In comparison to the tutorial I used for my first project, this was very basic and only gave a rough layout- and it doesn’t work with godot 4.x if you just blindly copy what AJ08Coder is doing. Nevertheless, I think it was a very good learning experience.
What I think worked out well:
I achieved what I was hoping to achieve- I learned some more about object movement patterns and target acquisition;
I had plenty of practice using arrays;
I learned how to switch scenes and how to use global variables/scripts;
I had my first-hand experience at making my own assets and got some more practice using animation player;
I think I made thematically and visually consistent project.
What I think didn’t work out:
My UI is bad, and control nodes were giving me a lot of trouble;
Constantly testing and balancing my game on my own might lead to other people experiencing a difficulty spike if they don’t use similar strategies as me;
I had TONS of issues until I finally understood how to use call_deferred- and none of the tutorials ever mention it. I literally spend almost 4 hours just figuring that one command- mostly because I couldn’t find any examples how to use it
I didn’t have a clear vision or plan when I started the project. As a result, I had to constantly keep myself in check not to get carried away by making the project more and more complicated by adding more and more elements- because every time something actually worked I wanted to expand on it.
To sum up, though it’s far from perfect, I’m still quite pleased with the outcome. Even though this project definitely has a potential to be expanded and polished, I do not think I’ll get back to it, as balancing a tower defence game was far more taxing than I imagined
I think I’ll spend the next weekend- or two- by clearing my head and just playing games. After that, my next project will be something in-between a visual novel and choose-your-own-adventure, as I feel I need to get more practice with control nodes and UI
I wish my progress was faster, but having a full time job- and a night shift one at that- leaves me with little time to spare apart from the weekends.
As for the progress, once I finish the UI, the core of the game will be done. I already have the core game loop working pretty well, but will probably need to add a few more tower and enemy types with a bit of a different behaviour, because so far I just focused on 1 type of tower and 1 type of enemy.
