Add Settings and Final Levels

This is a huge devlog, mostly because this last part of the game jam was extremely chaotic. Now that I’ve submitted my game, I have the time to write a devlog.

After receiving feedback from others, I learned that the pixelation effects could be very jarring for some, but that others really liked the effect. Because I was getting these conflicting opinions, I decided to make this a setting for those who need it, but to keep the effect on as a default. Because this meant I was building a settings system, I also decided to implement volume settings. None of this was super difficult, but the settings had to be hooked up into every other part of the game.

With this out of the way, I still needed more levels. At this point I had 5 levels, which is the amount that I’ve submitted for some other games. However, due to how short these levels are, I wanted to get all the way to 10 levels. Level design is certainly not my strong suit, so this took a significant amount of time. I tried to make the levels difficult, but after receiving some more feedback, it’s clear that I probably should’ve made it easier.

With these new levels, I also added a new mechanic—blocks that will flip the rotation direction when contacted. These were much easier to implement than the sticky blocks, but still required me to work on many different parts of the game. These blocks gave me a new tool to use for level design, which helped out a lot.

I made some more tweaks to the export settings, and with about 15 minutes to spare, I uploaded my files to Itch.io. I wasn’t able to test all of the exports, but the web and MacOS versions definitely work, and my game uploaded just fine.

I’m not totally sure about the future of this project—every other game jam game has been abandoned as soon as the jam was finished, but I really like the mechanics of this one. Because of this, I may actually end up fleshing it out more and developing a full game, but I also might not—we’ll see.

Work on README and do some polishing

This was mostly working on my README, which wasn’t too difficult, but I had to figure out how I wanted to embed my images. I ended up just linking to the ones that I uploaded to Itch.io, because they were hosting them for me. I followed the README guidelines from Stardance, and I think I have a solid, professional README.

Once the README was written, I reused most of the text for my Itch.io page and made that look presentable. I also fixed some issues with window scaling, but these changes were minor.

Really all I have left at this point is to make some levels, which I’ve clearly been putting off. As of writing this, I have about two days left in the game jam, so I feel comfortable with my time.

Add music and sound effects

This devlog covers a lot of different things that I worked on, but the most major was music and sound effects. For music, I was able to find an old song that one of my friends had made for a different project. We didn’t end up using it for that game, but I think it fits the vibes of this game pretty well, so I dropped it in. I found sound effects from OpenGameArt (with the CC0 license—one of my favorite parts of that site is that you can filter by license), but getting them into the game was much harder than with the music.

Jump sounds were easy; I just played the sound whenever you jumped. However, I also wanted landing sounds, and these proved much more difficult. Because of the constantly rotating level, the physics engine is constantly registering lots of collisions. If I just played the sounds whenever the player collided with the floor, they would play way too often. To remedy this, I instead tried to check the incoming velocity to get a sense of the “strength” of the collisions, but this didn’t work particularly well. Eventually, I ended up putting a limit on how often the sound can play per “shape” (Godot turns each large chunk of the tilemap into a single shape to simplify the physics simulation). This was very difficult to get right, but I’m happy with the result.

Now that I had all of these new assets, I had to update the credits. While I was working on UI, I also decided it would be a good idea to add an end screen—before when the player won, nothing really happened. This was pretty easy to do, but I might want to update it later to make it look better. With this in place, the game feels much more complete, if not for the lack of levels.

I only have a few days left in the game jam, so I will spend the next part of my time on configuring the export and building my Itch page. Once I’m happy with both of these, I’ll finish up my levels and submit. I’m hoping to reach a total of ten levels, but we’ll see where I end up.

Create more levels

I added two more unique levels, for a new total of five. Each level helps teach parts of the game that I want to incorporate into future levels, and the fifth level is genuinely somewhat challenging.

I put a lot of thought and consideration into these levels, and tested them thoroughly. These taught me things like how far the player can jump and how to make the player use momentum for their benefit. I hope that what I learned can help me make even better levels in the future.

Everything that I said I still needed to do in the last devlog still stands—that means I still need more levels and mechanics, and that I still need to incorporate sound into my game. I will try to work on these as soon as possible, and I have a few ideas for new mechanics.

Create credits and clean up player movement

I created a simple credits scene, and although I plan to add more to it later, it should suffice for now. I tinkered around a lot with the layout, and I went with something pretty simple. Because the credits are going to be extremely short, I decided not to go with scrolling credits like I’ve done in the past.

In addition to this, I also worked on player movement for a while, refining some aspects so that they would fit the game better. I made the cooldown to launch from a sticky block much shorter so that they felt more responsive, and I lowered the threshold for something to be considered a “floor”. This means that the player can jump off of steeper slopes, and I may end up removing the threshold entirely, effectively allowing wall jumps.

In the future I clearly need to add more levels, given that my current count is still at three.m With those, I need two things: new interesting mechanics and a good tutorial. As it is, it’s quite hard for a player to just jump into the game, because they need to know more about the controls and how you’re meant to play. A tutorial will help significantly with this problem. The game also currently has no sound, which makes it feel boring and uninteresting. I plan to add sound effects for things like jumping and landing, but I’m not completely confident in my music abilities. Because of this, I’m attempting to get a few other people to help me, but if needed I can create the music myself.

Added a title screen and polished some of the transitions

The title screen really helps tie the game together, and makes it feel much more like a real game. I found two fonts on Itch to use for my game—Chonkly and 3x3 Mono. Both are CC0, and I’ve yet to use 3x3 Mono, but I might use it for smaller text later.

The transition between levels and when you die and the level resets both looked pretty bad, flashing a gray screen and looking quite jittery. I hunted around a bit for the source of the problem, and eventually discovered that it was due to my camera’s position smoothing. I fixed this by calling reset_smoothing() in the relevant places.

All in all, this really made the game feel more complete, and I’m really happy with where it’s going. In the future, I need to add more levels and the mechanics that go with those. If I have a large number of levels, I may also need a level select menu.

Added a level system with loading and transitions

Touching the goal blocks will now trigger a transition to the next level, and to test out this system, I developed two new levels for a total of three.

I decided to dynamically load level scenes by looking for scenes/levels/0.tscn, scenes/levels/1.tscn, etc. This system worked well, but when reaching the goal for the next level, it would try to load a nonexistent file and crash. I fixed this by calling a win() function instead of loading a level file when the file cannot be found.

Next, I plan to add a few more levels, or maybe work on some of the main UI. The newer levels will introduce other special blocks and mechanics.

Added sticky blocks

These blocks are the first of several that I plan to add in order to make the game more interesting and make for better levels. Whenever you run into a sticky block, you snap to its position and stop moving, while the level continues to rotate. Once stuck, you can launch yourself in any direction by pressing that key.

I decided to add these because I thought it would be cool to have levels where you launch yourself through a large number of sticky blocks, and they add a method of transportation other than the basic rolling and jumping.

I’m thinking about ideas for other blocks, and as soon as I have a few I’ll start to build some levels.

Completed the basic mechanics such as the rotating level, rolling, and jumping

I had to go through several different iterations to get the rotation to work—at first I tried to rotate the player and have gravity change with them. I thought that this would eliminate issues with collisions, but it turns out this was the wrong approach. Then I tried rotating the level, and this had the problems I expected—the player constantly phased through the walls of the level and didn’t move very well. Finally I decided to use a rigid body for the player, which worked, but meant I had to use forces and torques instead of the kinds of movement I was used to. Eventually I got everything to work and I’m happy with the result.

For this prototype I used very simple art and a pixelation shader that I modified from one of my other projects, but I think it actually turned out looking pretty good, so I might keep it.

Next I plan to get some levels prototyped and some of my secondary mechanics developed. Hopefully after this I’ll have something good enough to post on Itch.

Basic movement and tileset

I implemented a simple movement system based off of a previous game, and set up a tileset so that I could build and test levels.

I Also added some CC0 assets for testing purposes (I’ll change the assets later–I don’t really think they fit the style I’m going for) and set up the Hackatime extension. No actual gameplay mechanics yet, but I’ll do some testing and create some soon.

I’m planning to implement sets of rules that change for each run, and the player will have to figure out how the rules work in order to progress and complete the run.