Hello, I know this post is entirely new, but I’ve been participating in the Devtober Jam since it started this month. While I was hoping to work in secrecy and post my game on the last day along with this post-mortem, I sadly failed to get my game ready in time. However, I don’t consider this a failure, as this was my first real attempt at making a game from scratch. While I could work on the game from the start, I ran into many roadblocks and bugs, which were both colossal pain to work around. I regret not teaming up with someone, but I didn’t know how far I would get, and I was afraid to waste someone else’s time considering my lack of coding knowledge. I did get close to having the main mechanic and level playable, but there are so many issues I have to solve that if I released it for people to play right now, it would be a mess.

Even though I’m using Godot, learning how to get nodes to interact with each other was a huge undertaking, and I found out many times that GDScript does not like while loops. Pathing was a pain because the NPCs would get stuck on each other, and when I set them to avoid each other, they ended up pathing into areas they weren’t supposed to be in. Signals through code were kind of difficult for me for some reason. I couldn’t get the nodes to signal to each other though I assumed it was because I was instancing some nodes (i.e., the NPCs and Mobs) into the scene during gameplay instead of having them placed in the map already. So most of my interactions were through triggering hitboxes.

I don’t consider this a failure because I learned so much along the way. Pathing was something new to me that I had to use for the level to work how I wanted it to, and while the pathing for one of the NPCs kept getting screwed up, it mostly worked. I learned how to make, rig, and animate a character for the first time in Blender, which surprisingly took less time than figuring out pathing in Godot. Finally, I learned how to shorten my code to make it more efficient despite it still being a plate of spaghetti. Even though my game might be held together with duct tape and glue at the moment, it was enjoyable to work on it, and I still plan to finish the game hopefully soon; If not, I guess I’ll work on it during the next Devtober.