Post by crazyhoundgamedesign in Slime Invasion jam comments

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Hi, I just played your game.

I noticed you said it was a prototype. I think the idea is pretty solid, but it needs balancing.

I managed to win the game by putting a double cannon on ground level and basically blew everything away. Before figuring out that I could add this cannon, the enemies too quick for the starting cannon or a different cannon to be effective.

It could be fun if things were slowed down just a little I think, and maybe alter the ground defence location, give it a weaker weapon or something you have to manually interact with with a different input.

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Mifuyne157 days ago

Hey, thanks for the comment! Maybe prototype isn’t the right word for it? I didn’t have time to put it through a balancing pass before the deadline 😞 but yes, it definitely needs one! Would tech demo convey that better?

But yeah, I certainly wouldn’t start the game with all those slots open, or access to the double barrel turrets. The slime spawn timing and amount needs to be based on a curve rather than relying on just the RNG! I had wanted to add other features like ground defences, such as pit traps, spike traps, etc, that opens up further along.

This entry, at the very least, was more a proof to myself that I could have the moving parts built and put in…in 4 days too. I spent too much of the game jam changing my mind about what game I wanted to make, what would be feasible with what little “on-my-own” knowledge I had of Godot. It was a massive learning experience. All the courses and tutorial in the world can’t help you learn something until you’re willing to apply that experience into something else, on your own. Taking off the training wheels, so to speak!

This comment has gotten a bit long and probably could’ve served better as a post mortem, LOL.

Once again, thank you for your time, and your suggestions! I appreciate the input, it helped reinforce some ideas I already had and gave me some new ones to consider 😁

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crazyhoundgamedesign157 days ago

No problem, it's my first jam and first published game.

As an exercise for myself a few months ago, I tried to make a game to the rules of another jam and found that I needed to make sure I planned to make a game I could actually make in the timeframe.

For this jam, once I had an idea for a game I thought about what mechanics I would like to implement and tried to make sure the work was something I could actually do.

As I'm generally trying to avoid premade assets, this had to include time for making the art and sound work as well.

If you want a long post, I made a post mortum / story of my experience from zero here

https://itch.io/blog/747081/from-zero-to-my-1st-game-jam

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Mifuyne157 days ago

Admittedly, this isn’t my first game I’ve ever made. It was the first Godot game I made from start to “finish” without a course or tutorial hand-holding me the whole way through. Don’t get me wrong, those things helped me figure out some things, like how to implement my own state machine (although the version I learned was in C#, I learned to rewrite it in GDScript).

With all the game ideas I had, I did break them down into smaller mechanics, and listed out what needed to be done. But for whatever reason, my brain locked up and I was stuck in the constant state of, “I don’t know how to start this!” Anxiety and panic set in and I was throwing out ideas until I found one where I can picture the efforts to go from point A to point Z. That’s what finally broke me out of that frozen state…unfortunately, with only about 4 days left by then.

But maybe that’s why they suggested we come up with a game idea we can make in 4-5 days, LOL. Lesson learned! 😁

I think my biggest takeaway from my experience here is that I need a lot more experience with the game engine I plan on using. I’m definitely not saying everyone needs this. I believe I need it to build up the confidence to just power through the doubt and uncertainties that comes up.

That, or make sure to join a long length game jam! I’m actually in one right now, learning a new game engine. Really barebones and documentation has been lacking but I’m finally at a point where I’m having fun with it.