Show HN: The Jumping Jouster, a Godot game I made in my spare time(clay.itch.io)
clay.itch.io
Show HN: The Jumping Jouster, a Godot game I made in my spare time
https://clay.itch.io/the-jumping-jouster
5 comments
I made The Jumping Jouster over a few months, in my spare time. The browser version requires Chrome. I'm happy to answer any questions about working with Godot, the rewards and/or challenges of making the game, the effectiveness of conscripting my children to be Quality Assurance, etc. It was a lot of fun to make!
Fun little game. I'm also looking to start a side project in Godot.
What was the most time consuming piece of this game? Art? Physics?
What did Godot make easy-peasy?
What was the most time consuming piece of this game? Art? Physics?
What did Godot make easy-peasy?
The horse animations took a long time, but also were a lot of fun to work on. I thought I was going to need to use a tool like Spine to create the animations, but the built-in AnimationPlayer node in Godot is really powerful, so I ended up using that for everything. For art, I have an iPad and a Mac, so I used Affinity Designer. I would draw on the iPad, save to iCloud, then load it up on the Mac for tweaking and export. GDScript is a breeze to use and the documentation is pretty good, so I rarely struggled to figure out how to do anything in code.
Ultimately, the most time-consuming part was probably building some systems that I never ended up using in the game. It wasn't "scope creep," per se... more that I never had determined scope to begin with. For example, in the game, there's only grass, but I actually created all of the art and a track generation system for multiple different ecosystems, only to realize that I had fallen down the Procgen rabbit hole and didn't need it for the gameplay.
The game itself actually doesn't use a physics engine. I use a few Vectors here and there to calculate acceleration. I've done some small projects that use physics, however, and it's very easy to incorporate them with Godot.
The export to HTML5 in Godot 3.1 is not great. I couldn't get it working with GLES2 (for reasons unknown to me) so I had to switch to GLES3, which largely limits to Chrome for in-browser play. It never was a goal to make it playable on the web. If I were to start over again, I'd include a loading screen so that the sound wouldn't get choppy at the start of the game and I would do a lot more incremental testing of the web exporting to make sure it worked well.
I use Unity at work. Godot is an absolute pleasure to use compared to Unity. It lacks bloat, has a great user community, it easy to get started with, and uses a scene hierarchy model that, to me, is more intuitive.
Ultimately, the most time-consuming part was probably building some systems that I never ended up using in the game. It wasn't "scope creep," per se... more that I never had determined scope to begin with. For example, in the game, there's only grass, but I actually created all of the art and a track generation system for multiple different ecosystems, only to realize that I had fallen down the Procgen rabbit hole and didn't need it for the gameplay.
The game itself actually doesn't use a physics engine. I use a few Vectors here and there to calculate acceleration. I've done some small projects that use physics, however, and it's very easy to incorporate them with Godot.
The export to HTML5 in Godot 3.1 is not great. I couldn't get it working with GLES2 (for reasons unknown to me) so I had to switch to GLES3, which largely limits to Chrome for in-browser play. It never was a goal to make it playable on the web. If I were to start over again, I'd include a loading screen so that the sound wouldn't get choppy at the start of the game and I would do a lot more incremental testing of the web exporting to make sure it worked well.
I use Unity at work. Godot is an absolute pleasure to use compared to Unity. It lacks bloat, has a great user community, it easy to get started with, and uses a scene hierarchy model that, to me, is more intuitive.
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Looks like a Godot point release today fixed a lot of GLES2 issues, so I’ll see if I can get that working soon. https://godotengine.org/article/maintenance-release-godot-3-...
It works on Firefox 70.0.1
I'm thinking of making a game in my spare time for fun with Godot. Did you enjoy using Godot?
I have a blast with Godot. It lets me really focus on making the game instead of navigating through a bunch of stuff I don't understand. The Discord and various other Godot communities are great, too. As open source software, there are some known issues that simply end up at the back of the priority queue for remediation, but in general, anything important is patched quickly. Plus, if you're so inclined, you can help patch the core product. I really like working with it and I try to pitch in where I can with the docs, etc.
(Not op, just chiming in)
I really love working in Godot, it’s a wonderful and fast program. It is tedious to find how something works however because the docs are pretty sparse and the tutorial community is so small. It can take forever to find the function you need to call for something, or what the limitations of something like tilemaps are
I also miss the python libraries and procedures I’m used to (it uses a python inspired custom language called gdscript)
I’m going to try it for a larger project later this year and see how painful it ends up being to figure things out. It’s a really great program for everything I do know how to do
I really love working in Godot, it’s a wonderful and fast program. It is tedious to find how something works however because the docs are pretty sparse and the tutorial community is so small. It can take forever to find the function you need to call for something, or what the limitations of something like tilemaps are
I also miss the python libraries and procedures I’m used to (it uses a python inspired custom language called gdscript)
I’m going to try it for a larger project later this year and see how painful it ends up being to figure things out. It’s a really great program for everything I do know how to do
In case anybody comes across this in the future... I added this to the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-jumping-jouster/id14895181...