Finally made a first release of my frogger game for the gamedev challenge yesterday:
What went right
- Using Godot Engine. Godot and GDScript was very quick to learn and get started with, and is very good for these types of small scale games. Overall I preferred it to Unity which I used last challenge.
- Using skin modifier for modelling in blender. This enabled me to make game creature models fast, around a day for modelling, rigging, animating and texturing a model.
- Using 3d paint for texturing creatures. Having spent many months developing 3d paint, it is really starting to pay off in quick texturing of assets. Blender can do this texturing too, but the workflow is much faster in 3d paint.
What went wrong
- 3d sound broken in Godot. I had to do some bodging to get any kind of positional sound working, and it is flakey at best. I hope they will fix this soon.
- Android support not yet working. My android hardware / emulator only seem to support OpenGL ES 2, and Godot only supports ES 3, up until the 3.1 release. I tried the 3.1 alpha but no joy as yet.
- Creating art assets took most of my time, approx 2/3 of the development time (I am not an artist!).
- Moving house - I only realistically had the first 3 weeks to work a lot on the game, so tried to finish as much as possible early up. I do not even have access to computer / internet at new house yet.
- Dealing with different aspect ratios. I don't really deal with this as yet, I may have to address this.
- Normal mapping the assets. I tried this on the cars but it is very finicky to get working right and I don't have much experience. Took a lot of time and the difference was negligable so I dropped it.
- Procedural terrain texturing. Implemented but was too slow in GDScript, so I precreated 5 terrain textures and just used them in the levels. Same algorithm was fast enough in Unity in C# so I think GDScript is several times slower currently. (However I do prefer the GDScript language to C#)
- No wheels on cars. This is just funny, I always intended to put them in but never got round to it!!
- Dropping lots of features due to lack of time. This is typical of gamedev in general, but luckily I had enough features to make it playable. There is already support for other pickups like score and poison etc, I just didn't have time to make the models.
I liked what you did with this. The art confidently is a time drainer, but on the plus side you shared all your assets for people to use which I believe you're the first one to ever do this.
On that note, your article on skinning is extremely helpful for people looking to model creatures.
For the amount of time you put forth this turned out to be a great entry. I love the camera toggle as well! Good touch!