So, Ludum Dare 48 has concluded it's first day. I'm participating in the jam version of the event, which means I have 2 days left.
Not too shabby! But, also not too great.
The Good 👍
The Bad 👎
The Ugly 🙈
Last night and most of today was spent hashing out ideas and getting setup.
When the theme was announced last night, Rollin and I stayed up for awhile brainstorming some ideas. The theme was DEEPER & DEEPER, which surprisingly has a lot of mileage in it for some pretty wacky ideas.
After going back and forth for a bit, we got down to a voting round to see which was not only the most fun idea, but also the most feasible.
Rollin is using some new tech & software, so he'll be slow while learning that stuff.
I'm using a new game engine with a new programming language, so I'll be slow while doing that.
Overall, this event is more a learning experience than a showoff experience.
It takes place under water, and in the dark. So, first things first I need to implement a light mask:
Godot makes this trivial to do. Literally just requires a Light2D node with a custom light texture, and then set to Add.
This got a bit trickier. The light mask was just 1 node, but for shadows to work you have to setup LightOccluder2D nodes, and I wasn't positive I was making the markers on the right stuff, but in the end I got some shadow casting.
Combining the two took some trial and error, as lights can sometimes not play well with each other, but eventually I got something looking nice.
2 main reasons the browser is an important target:
So, naturally, when what was rendering just fine in the engine wasn't displaying right in the browser... I was bummed. And I went to bed with my bummed head and had a bunch of bummer dreams.
BUT! When I woke up, I opened Godot back up and completely redid the lighting system. I watched a few different tutorials to learn the right way to implement lights, and learned about the CanvasModulate node. Super fucking sick.
Now, we have lights & shadows working in the browser:
I know, pretty fucking rad.
But, can we make it radder?
After discussing a bit with my boy Rollin, we started playing around with the idea of having the tiles be just black walls, no textures, and then I went and changed the shadows to be a smoother dropoff. Playing around with the Light2D node's Shadow properties can achieve some neat effects.
Hence, radder shadows:
The dark and eerie vibe play well into the overall concept we have for the game, so I'm super pleased with how it turned out.
I pitched the idea of putting magical pearls into ancient god-like oysters to proceed to deeper levels. Each pearl, and its associated oyster, would be a different color.
For instance, the ancient Red-Oyster-Of-Magma:
Yeeeaaah, sick.
How about we mess around with shadows now?
YEEEAAAH, SICK AS FUUUCK.
So far not too shabby as I said. There's still some more work I'll try to accomplish for tonight, but as an overall, I'd say today was decent.
The main work happening now is with physics. Every game engine seems to have their own way of dealing with them, so it's always a bit of effort to shake off what you might be used to and play by the quirks of the new engine.
Godot has RigidBody2D and KinematicBody2D nodes that I think I want to use, but not sure about the specifics of each. Will need to do more research.
At this point, I'm not sure about our ability to finish the game for the jam. Learning a brand new game engine, and trying to make a light-based, monster-ai-having, smooth-physics-golfing-game is a tough thing to do.
But it's ok.
This game will always be here, waiting for us to complete.
This event is just a fun excuse to jam on something together, and learn new shit.
Either way, tomorrow is day 2!
More fun to be had!
See you all then!
- Chimp CEO 🐒
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