This Ludum Dare i had the brilliant idea of changing engines from Unity to Godot, knowing absolutely nothing about Godot.

To be fair i used Godot once over 5 years ago, which would be the same as knowing nothing about it.

After using Godot for almost 72 hours what do i think of it?

Overall it's a pretty good engine, as someone that has been using Unity for the past 5 years it wasn't as hard as i thought it would be to make a game in the engine. It was pretty easy to work with GDScript, although i just used the most basic of functionalities and wasn't able to actually make everything that i wanted for the game, which was expected, i was still able the majority of basic functionalities, partially thanks to a jammer that shared a Godot project starter before the jam started (i can't find the post anymore, but they can be found on github as jhlothamer).

With the project starter i could focus most of my attention on the gameplay code, as i expected it ended up as spaghetti code and still had some bugs that i couldn't solve. I think that if i had started learning it a few weeks before and hadn't procrastinated i would be able to deliver the game as i intended.

Summing up my experience with Godot:

Coding: 4/5 - Easy to pickup and code simple things, couldn't make some advanced things work because i didn't get it, the lack of brackets make it weird to understand.

Implementing art: 4.5/5 - Extremely easy to implement new art and update art. Didn't like that you have to write the path to the sprite in order to load sprites to use in code.

Implementing sound: 4/5 - Easy to just play the music, but it had some features that were hidden, like the function to loop the sound.

I'll probably keep using Godot, i was already planning to change from unity to a different engine since i had a lot of issues with it, including losing progress multiple times when trying to save. I'll try working on a few more small projects using Godot before making a final decision whether i'll change to Godot or not.

Also obligatory link to my own game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/cooking-is-relaxing

Overall

This time i'm ending the jam not satisfied with my performance, I ended up having less time than i thought i had, made some mistakes that didn't think i would make after 5 years making games, planned to go for the compo but had to go for the jam instead. But well, time to analyze what was good and what was bad this jam.

The good

My game is done (play here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/$379508 ), i learned some new things, like how to make a boss battle in Godot and how to do some very basic vector art, also i think this was a better fight than the one i made for LD52, which was an incredibly unfair fight. I think my idea was interesting and unique enough, a mix between a boss fight and an auto battler. You control the movement of your character but it attacks on its own using the items that are currently active, you could combine 3 of the same item to level it up, just like you have 1,2 and 3 stars on normal auto battlers, with this you would have to manage your inventory and make interesting choices on what to level up. Some items would be consumables that can be used once, some would be buffs that would permanently enhance the player even after they are removed from the active bar.

The bad

It took way longer than I wanted to come up with a good idea for my game, when I got the idea I failed to take scope and time in consideration, which led to me not having enough time to make it interesting enough, for this idea to be interesting i would need a lot of content, like a variety of items and boss attacks, unfortunately i only had the time to implement the base for the boss attacks and for the items. As someone that is really bad at making art and the only art that I used before was pixel art, trying to learn how to create vector art was a complete mess, I struggled to do the most basic things and ended up taking way more time with art than i wanted to. At the end this vector art adventure ended up costing me time that i should use on programming and the results were not good. I ended up giving up on the Compo due to all this art complication and didn't even bother with making my own music since i wouldn't have time to go for the Compo.

Scores for myself this LD

Programming: 3/5 Could be better and could have done way more if i hadn't wasted so much time with art

Art: 1/5 Never doing vector art again, at least for games, way too confusing, didn't even find a way to animate things without separating them and making it animate through code or piece by piece.

Sound: -/5 Didn't make any music myself, only implemented some that i already had, so not much to say about it