Ross Karchner

Current thinking for the jam, either:

• starting over from scratch on the NS-Tower-inspired game I’ve tinkered with on and off (see a GIF of it here), and adding something to escape from, like a rising water level.
• a horizontal - scrolling space shooter where you can only move in short bursts, which I’m calling “we only have hyperdrive”

I’m signed up for Godot Wild Jam #66, with a theme of “Escape”– which is pretty straightforward, as far as game jam themes go. I do think it’s quite cool that GWJ has accessibility as a rating category, and I’m going to try to see how much of the accessibility guidelines I can meet.

The jam goes for nine days. My current thinking on timing is: have something basically working by early next week, then use the rest of the time to polish the graphics, UI, and audio.

I did the thing! I finished all 13 parts of Selinadev’s Godot 4 Roguelike tutorial.

There were a good number of things that were new to me: procedural map generation, AStar navigation, custom resources, and using those custom resources to compose entities. I’m happy with the knowledge gained by working through this.

The end product is… not my cup of tea, really.

On roguelikes generally: When I was a kid, one of the computers available to me had nethack installed. I poked around a bit, but it never really clicked for me (and the same computer had SimCity! ). One turn-based roguelike I do play these days is Hoplite. I think what I like about Hoplite is that it plays almost like a board or puzzle game, the challenge is in reasoning about how to get through the level safely.

On this particular game: after adding armor, weapons, and the power-ups available when you gain a level, combat is super easy, and the challenge curve stops when you get 8 levels deep. I appreciate the 1-bit art style, but it kills me a bit that a game that includes fireballs and lighting attack’s doesn’t make those things visually interesting events– baddies take damage, maybe die, and a message is logged. This isn’t really the author’s fault, since she adapted a tutorial that builds a classic terminal/console game. It’s just a shame this leaves behind a lot of the cool stuff Godot can do.

My son/project manager designed some new enemies and other graphics to be incorporate in the game, and I want to honor that effort by integrating those assets and ideas. I’ll probably spend another week doing that and maybe looking for other ways to increase the usability and fun factor.