32 Bit Jam 2024 Postmortdem

Michael's Postmortdem

This was a fun jam for me, three weeks is a good timeframe for making a game while still working a full time job. For this game we tried using Godot 4 for the first time which overall was a great experience for this kind of game. It being in the style of a 2D platformer, the Tileset editor in Godot 4 seemed like a great tool to get comfortable with, and it was. Godot is getting more and more powerful with every update. The biggest setback we didn't hit until we started trying to post it to itch.io... The Shared Array Buffer stuff really kinda made it scary, because I had no idea if it was going to work on anyone's computer. But, out of the few people who played it in the jam, they seemed to all have it working okay.

I'm happy that in the end, we have a working prototype of the game we wanted to make. I think we were able to put in almost half the features we wanted to, but all the one's that were necessary to play the barebones version of the game that's up now. We could polish these further, but here's the mechanics I was able to implement: 

Platformer mechanics - set jump height/speed that's adjustable down to the pixel, ground friction, air friction/speed, wall jumping, slide on walls, and the Jetpack. All of those variables were stored in a Resource so the Little guy was built as an inherited scene to The Keeper

Dialogue System - linear dialog system that uses Godot's resources to store each interaction

Base Collectables - plant scene that all collectables can share that gives each pickup an ID to use with the saving system

Saving system - a system that keeps track of if you have the jetpack, which plants you've recovered, and how far you've gotten in the dialogue. This is so that each time you go to the ship/to the world everything is the same as when you left last time. The only thing I forgot to add to the save system is the Jetpack collectable. But there's no bug involved with collecting the Jetpack two times.