I spent some time last night and this morning learning about Orchestrator, a visual scripting plugin for Godot. I was mostly taking a look to see if my son might want to try it out, as an alternative to “regular” coding. He knows Scratch pretty well, but hasn’t taken to written coding yet. I thought Orchestrator might offer him a way to make stuff happen in Godot, using a style of programming he’s used to.

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I used the Pong Wars deployment as an excuse to try out GitHub actions. It’s nice! Almost too nice, like the fact that it’s free makes me suspicious.

I ended up struggling with what I thought would be the easy part– GitHub pages. Back when I was a young man, all you needed to do was push your site files to the gh-pages branch. That still works, after you do some extra configuration. It was only the next day that I figured out what the problem is.

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I’ve published my Godot re-creation of Pong Wars by Koen van Gilst on GitHub (and embedded it below!) It’s not exactly a game– more of a “visual toy”. I did add some fun extras:

• left click a block to instantly flip it’s color
• right click anywhere to flip ALL of the blocks.

Honestly, I had convinced myself that I was going to rank higher in Godot Wild Jam #68, at least in the originality category. Being in the top third for originality is OK, though.

Much of the written feedback (even on the much rougher Ludum Dare version) supports the idea that this is worth developing further. I’m thinking of digging in and trying to make the best version of “Zummoning” that I can, and see where I am at the end of summer.

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I’ve made many improvements in the new version of “The Zummoning” submitted to Godot Wild Jam. Unfortunately, the name isn’t one of them. Oh well.

• Every card combination now actually does something
• There is help text that explains what the cards do, while you’re playing
• It’s clearer what is happening during the combat phase of the turn.
• More art, some music, and sound effects!

It’s still far from a professional production. But, I think it’s fun?

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I’m cleaning up “The Zummoning” for submission to Godot Wild Jam this weekend (The GWJ folks usually disallow games submitted to other jams, but make exceptions sometimes when schedules completely overlap, which was the case with Ludum Dare this month).

Tonight, I hope to improve the card-combining systems and remove some of the annoying gaps.

If I get more time before the deadline (Sunday night), I hope to add some UI improvements (primarily, make it less mysterious what the cards do, alone and in combination). I’d also like to make it clearer what’s actually happening during the combat phase.

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