Devtober Dungeon

Controls: 

Arrow Keys: Move

Ctrl: Shoot

Shift: Lock Aim

This is a submission to Devtober 2022

When I joined Devtober, I only had one goal in mind, gain familiarity with the Godot game engine. Way back in 2002 I made many small video games using Mark Overmars' Game Maker(now known as GameMaker Studio). The hobby of developing games grew into a passion for software engineering in general which ultimate became my 9 - 5 career. During the transition from hobbyist to professional, game development took a back seat until basically fading out of my life completely. For years I've told myself that I would get back on the horse and start developing games, and in 2016 I even made it a resolution and entered the Hangover Jam. However, I was never able to integrate the hobby back into my life as a habit. Building this game for Devtober will be a turning point in this story

Admittedly the game I've created is not too special or interesting but I am proud that it is a functional and complete project. When I started I didn't even really have an idea for what the game was going to be, I just started experimenting with the engine. In fact 90% of the work I did in the engine is not in the final project, and everything that made an actual game(Art, waves, tiles, music, lives, title screens, etc) came together in the final 7 days. After this experience I think I could reasonably rebuild the whole game in 3 days(and it would be way better)

Most of my gaming influences come from the 16 bit era of gaming, especially the arcade style games of the time, Run and Guns like Contra or Gunstar Heroes and Beat em Ups like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. Some elements that are indicative of these types of games are side scrolling levels that lock into place until you defeat waves of enemies and a boss fight at the end of a stage. In my early game development days I was never able to build anything like that and stuck to single screen games for the simplicity. Since I was able to actually implement these features for Devtober Dungeon not only am I reviving an old skill but I have built something different and, in a way, more advanced than I have before, so symbolically I am picking up where I left off nearly two decades ago.

Key Learnings:

A little progress is huge for momentum - I worked on this project nearly everyday in October, somedays I'd work for an hour or two, others less than 10 minutes. I would usually have a specific task in mind or just want to learn how something works in the engine, having a small goal like this in mind helped my momentum. If I finished a task that would get me excited about what I could accomplish next, if I just learned something about the engine thinking of creative ways to use that feature would be on my mind. I am already playing and thinking of video games with a new lens, breaking them down in head and trying to imagine ways I could implement them on my own.

Free Assets are a godsend - When I used to make games I had to create all my art from scratch. I am not a great visual artist nor a musician so that process is incredibly time consuming. It was amazing to see how many talented artists give away super high quality assets that can be freely used and modified(I actually created the slime death animation). These assets made creating Devtober Dungeon so much easier and overall made the process more fun and technically I could release this thing commercially!

I to get more familiarity with Vector Math - Don't have much more to say about this, Vector Math is critical to creating good games so I really gotta dust off the math books so I can reason about vectors more effectively 

Thanks for playing, hope you have fun

-Charles

Witch and Skeleton Sprite by cyberrumor(https://cyberrumor.itch.io/)

Slime Sprite by Ulerinn(https://ulerinn.itch.io/)

Purple Dungeon Tileset by Spriteshift (https://spriteshift.itch.io/) 

Music: Monstervania - Ghost Land By  HydroGene (https://opengameart.org/users/hydrogene)

Font: Lycanthrope Font by Chad Savage (http://www.sinisterfonts.com)