droqen's game dev (& pixel art) dump *and ama

[droqen]

okay, so, the first post of the original thread follows, buuut for now this post will also be a little game dev dump! also pixel art for games mostly! feel free to ask me anything about game dev, like if you're trying to get into it or anything, i spend too much time among game devs and i can help! i mostly use Godot Engine these days, and don't do much 3D stuff.

(you can also ama about pixel art. i mostly use Pyxel Edit.)

~

hello! it only occurred to me upon seeing mistreil's oarfish game that people outside of my videogame-development-obsessed circles might enjoy looking at and playing my games... so... i'm posting one!

crossing flowers!

i was playing with flower breeding and i wanted to see the system in action a lot faster, so last april i built this small unfinished prototype. it's pretty fun! i hope it still works! (it does not work on my mac anymore for some reason)

Crossing Flowers (dl for win, mac)​

 

[Mistreil]

i can confirm it works on windows! very cute! it took me a moment to figure out what i was doing, but it got fun fast (and overwhelming (in a good way) they grow so quickly).
i might be biased though, since 90% of my time on ACNH was spent breeding flowers and moving them around.

also: i'm a fan of the flowers moving when you step on them -- it's a nice little detail!

as a side question, if you're willing to entertain it: how is godot (particularly for 2d games)?
(i normally do game dev in HTML5+JS or unity, but 2d games in unity feels like overkill and is sort of a pain, while html5 is a pain in the other direction. i've been seeing godot a lot for pixel games, though, so i'm curious!)

 

[droqen]

(i hate unity lol i tried using it for years and it never really clicked as something that I actually enjoy using. big motivation killer. death death death)

I love Godot. I love it so much.

I saw in your ama that you like Python, and did you know that the scripting language in Godot is basically Python? It's the best.

I had the same feeling as you wrt Unity, and I tried some very tiny game engines in order to escape it (like PICO-8) but found they were too restrictive. I know some people who use things like Construct and Game Maker, but somehow I never really wanted to dig into any of those. Godot is maybe a little less efficient than Unity in terms of the end product, and it doesn't have quite as many bells and whistles out of the box ------ not that I ever used any of them >_>

HTML5+JS is definitely more lightweight if that's a big deal to you (i think an html build of an empty project in godot is still like 20MB, something like that)

Very happy to answer more questions if you have any!

~~~

It definitely... gets extremely overwhelming very fast, haha. I can relate. I think maybe at the time I was also spending way too much time breeding and watering flowers and moving them around and waiting and I wanted something on the opposite end of the spectrum to satisfy me lol

also: i'm a fan of the flowers moving when you step on them -- it's a nice little detail!

nice little details like that are the most fun! thank you for noticing/noting ^^;

 

[Mistreil]

✂

ooh, being similar to python is nice! i switch languages a lot anyways, but it's nice not having to fiddle too much with new syntax quirks all the time. being lightweight isn't a huge deal to me, though i prefer it (just from a convenience perspective, on both my side and player side).

i'll probably play with it over the next few weeks, but a few more questions! im sorry im turning this into a gamedev ama thread

• you mentioned html builds (and i've seen a few html builds of godot games before): are there any limitations for html5 exports? are there any weird quirks about them?
  i know unity could export to web, but it was finnicky at times and somewhat ugly.
• how does godot handle sprite animation (i.e. do you find it easy to use, a hassle, that sort of thing)? and i think it supports 2d skeletons -- have you used them? (and if you have: thoughts/opinions on it!)

on a less godot-related note: you should share other games/assets you've made too (or clips/gifs of games you've made)!

 

[droqen]

i see people do art dumps... maybe i can make... a game dump!!! thank you for the encouragement

I'm always down for gamedev ama'ing (maybe a little too much. the ama format is nice cuz it keeps me from rambling...)
- No weird quirks about html5 builds that I can think of. The support is really solid. Performance might suffer a bit. I think sound lags a very small amount. There are two render modes that you can choose from and the 'cheaper' one is recommended (GLES2 instead of GLES3). I always use the 'cheaper' one anyway. I'm... not a big complicated visual effects person, so I can't tell the difference lol. ALSO, it builds way faster than unity makes html builds
- Godot has some really good animation support! I've only been getting into it recently. Normally I just do simple spritesheet animations, but you can animate anything easily (scale, rotation, etc - all with bezier curves and stuff if you like - using a timeline system). I have never used its 2d skeletons, unfortunately, so I can't weigh in on that. a friend of mine was talking about them and seemed interested the other week though. if I ever get any first- or second-hand experience I'll let you know!

Here's something I made the other day while playing with some particle effects and curvy colliders:

Oh! And my avatar on belltree is from this game I released at the beginning of the year:


YRKKEY'S PARADISE (play in browser)

I'll share some more things I've done sometime soon! ^^

 

[droqen]

i'm working on this game about crossing the desert... i'm really enjoying making these pixelart scenes! a friend suggested i do it in the resolution of Mad Max (which is 2.39:1) so the game is 239x100 pixels because of that xP
i learned later that this is just 4K resolution. oops. still, i love making game at weird resolutions, and '239' is an extremely weird number of pixels wide to make your game, so i'm happy

oh also @shellbell made me some art i can use as a cover image when i'm ready to release the game!!!

@droqen asked me to make a cover image for a game he's making.

 

[droqen]

oh and @Mistreil i've been playing around with skeletons in godot! wtf! they're so good! i mean, i don't think godot's implementation of skeletons is better than anyone else's, but it was so easy to set up. ridiculously easy. i'm very bad at animating skeleton cutouts. but like whaaaat. anyway it seems totally usable! that's all i can really say, having never done this type of animation in anything else.

Spoiler: big gif

(followed this tutorial, took me like <half an hour. i did not do the art!!!)

 

[Mistreil]

oh and @Mistreil i've been playing around with skeletons in godot! wtf! they're so good! i mean, i don't think godot's implementation of skeletons is better than anyone else's, but it was so easy to set up. ridiculously easy. i'm very bad at animating skeleton cutouts. but like whaaaat. anyway it seems totally usable! that's all i can really say, having never done this type of animation in anything else.

Spoiler: big gif

(followed this tutorial, took me like <half an hour. i did not do the art!!!)

ooh -- sweet! taking less than half an hour to figure out how stuff works is amazing! thanks for letting me know; ill probably give it a try soon!!

 

[droqen]

ooh -- sweet! taking less than half an hour to figure out how stuff works is amazing! thanks for letting me know; ill probably give it a try soon!!

Just as a heads up keep in mind I'm already very experienced with other parts of the engine! Expect it to take you longer since you may have to get used to the node structure and the UI etc. Also... it mentions a "pencil icon" further down. That Doesn't Exist.

 

[Antonio]

Tell me about the Godot Engine and why I should use it to make games. @droqen

 

[droqen]

Tell me about the Godot Engine and why I should use it to make games. @droqen

Ooh

Okay, POINT ONE. Godot is open-source and free. There are a lot of other general-purpose game engines that are pretty good - Unity (I don't like it personally), Unreal, Game Maker, Construct (2? 3?). None of them, however, are open-source and free. They come with costs and strings attached.

My experience with other open-source and free software is a little bit iffy; GIMP is open-source and free, but it's also kinda just a worse and weirder photoshop. Here comes point number two! Godot is not just open-source and free, it's also my favourite engine regardless.

CAVEAT: I've literally been coding and making games for like my whole life... so take what I say here with a grain of salt. I think Game Maker and Construct might be easier to get into, or Pico-8, or like Twine or Bitsy if you just want to dabble in certain microgenres without screwing around with code. (I have a lot of respect for 'not wanting to screw around with code')

Free Microgenre-making Tools
- Twine (text adventures, kinda)
- Bitsy (little pixel topdown walking sims? minimal gameplay, basically just walking around spaces. i love it aesthetically, but too restrictive for me)

POINT TWO. If you're looking for a general-purpose engine that does it all, Godot, uh, does it all. This is up to your personal taste, but some of the things I liked about Godot a lot, after leaving Unity:

- It has great dedicated 2D graphics support, especially for pixels
- It has all of the major features I want: built-in physics, easy controller support, decent visual editor stuff, amazing capability to write your own tools.
- The language that it uses is basically Python, which i love (ymmv - some people hate python haha. it's simple and straightforward tho.)
- Compared to Unity, the editor is very lightweight, and it builds very fast.

Some of the things I liked about Godot a lot, after trying some more 'raw' code solutions (like trying to write stuff from scratch in js, etc)

- It has a visual editor. If I want to put something on the screen, I just put it where I want it in the editor scene instead of mucking about with code and things occasionally breaking and me not being able to see my game at all.
- uh that's pretty much it, but it is a big one

Okay I'm going to go for now but let me know if that brings up any more questions. I'm not sure how advanced you are with code, or whether you wanted to know "Why should make games at all?" or if that was already a given and you just wanted to know why to use Godot, specifically.

 

[Antonio]

- The language that it uses is basically Python, which i love (ymmv - some people hate python haha. it's simple and straightforward tho.)

YESSS, PYTHON IS THE BEST.

Regarding the physics, how realistic is it?

 

[droqen]

Regarding the physics, how realistic is it?

it's physics! It doesn't have anything super fancy as far as I'm aware (no soft body or like liquid simulations or whatnot) but IMO most realistic-feeling physics are more about the presentation than the physics engine's capabilities

 

[droqen]

I saw N64's Inktober Challenge and thought I'd do the same but for designing little games! I have a very comfortable relationship with making things very fast, and my style is quite simple, so it's not as totally bonkers as it might sound

This is the first one, in which you are allergic to flowers.

Post automatically merged: Oct 1, 2021

(Also it'll be nice to lose myself in something other than mafia for a while... mafia is so intense...)

 

[droqen]

I made a 2nd game but I only took one gif and it's too big for belltreemafia!!!

I made sure to take a video of game 3. I am really happy with this dumb mashup of hedge trimming and pac-man

 

[droqen]

Day 4. I normally make platformers, so it was nice to return to form... I really think this one is just super fun to play, even if it is a little scary (there are places you can just perma-die, which may is not the best choice? but it's super avoidable, i swear!)

My sister is not very good at platformers but I would like to make things that she can enjoy
So this one is a very easy game (you can just blast through all the rocks and it takes no platforming skill) but there is an alternate goal you can take on (don't destroy any rocks) that I think is a really fun technical challenge. I'm still working on exactly how to encourage this kind of thing -- how to fit it all in the same game. Right now there's just a little drone that gets mad at you, but you can still "win" even if you anger the drone.

(p.s. there are no playable game links yet, just these videos... my plan is to bundle the 31 very tiny games together into 1 medium-sized game and release that shortly after the end of the month)

 

[droqen]

I feel a little scared I might run out of ideas but I'm still going pretty strong...
Here are a couple more videos: a horror-stealth game, and a silly bike racing game.

It seems these games are getting way less colourful as time goes on though. I need to spend a bit more time on my palettes and imagining bright colourful pixelart worlds again!

But sad dark caverns are so easy to imagine, lol

 

[droqen]

Hi this one is hilarious n I'm very happy about it :') I was worried that making a game every day would really exhaust me and leave me super tired and uncreative but then I bang this out in a couple hours?! I guess I've still got some fuel in the tank! I'm 1/3 of the way there!

 

[droqen]

Omg, it's over... I made a trailer out of my 31-game compilation:

And if you like the look of it, you can... buy it? It's only $5, and it has a good few hours of gameplay!

If you do I would love to see your custom cases. (There is a little case-decorating minigame! You play the games and then put stickers on them so you can tell which one is which) (Also you can throw games into the trash)

31 unmarked games by droqen

thirty-one games by droqen, in a simulated cassette tape wonderland

droqen.itch.io

 

[droqen]

I used to think I wasn't much of an aesthetics-decorator-type person. I find AC can be pretty overwhelming for me! But I think the collectibles minigame here is really cute... and I obviously like making tiny pixel art scenes... so it was really nice making a tiny art / customization toy in a game that I'm actually able to appreciate. Like, I appreciate it so much. I think I'm going to make more games with little customization tools from now on @_@