The Invisible Alligator

I’m not that proud of The Invisible Alligator in its current form, but the Godot Wild Jam 82 deadline is here, and it’s nice to ship a game after almost 6 months of not doing much gamedev.

It could use more levels, sound and music, animation, more NPC variety, and more effort spent on graphics. The core gameplay isn’t that fun yet, but Benjamin calls it “satisfying”, so that’s something.

I started out thinking about it as a 2D version of Hitman Go, with animals. It ended up in a place that (if built out more) would feel a bit like Hoplite.

Maybe I’ll keep tinkering, towards a more polished post-jam version.

It wasn’t that difficult to adapt my little loop programming system to 3D. Maybe the year of 3D is back on?

For the moment though, I think I will switch my focus to Godot Wild Jam 82. The theme is “unseen”. This is probably a terrible idea, but right now I’m thinking: echolocation?

Loopnik Begins

Some progress on the “beat game” remake (for the moment, called “Loopnik”). It’s much easier now that I have a better idea of what I’m doing and how to structure things. Aside from level advancement, this does everything the original does, with half the lines of code.

The “graphics” are kind of charmless and generic right now, but they’re placeholders. The donut is from Kenney.

From so bad it's good to so good it's good

My first game jam entry was beat game, submitted to the So Bad It’s Good Game Jam in July 2023. Until then, I’d worked on tutorials, toy projects, and had done some tinkering on a recreation of Spin Doctor.

The game ranked 4th overall and won the “uniqueness” category. I’m proud of that, but clearly the “so bad” theme worked in my favor. I periodically wonder what a good version of that game would look like, and I’m looking for a way to get back into game dev after a couple of months out of it.

So, that’s my summer project, I think. I’m eyeing a few upcoming game jams, but if I get some momentum on this, I’ll probably just keep plugging away on it.