Initial Release

It's 5 minutes after the deadline for the Practice Beginner's Circle Jam 2, my first foray into solo development (plus a little help from the Godot icon). I remember thinking to myself about a week in, after completing what would turn out to be half of my needed tileset, that I might manage to finish this up well before it's due. You can see where things started to go wrong.

The funny thing about game development is that work always seems to mount the further you get into it. A simple collision event becomes about 8 nodes that tread all over each other and need 23.5 different colliders each on different levels and make the screen look like a mess. In as slight of an amount of retrospect as 2 weeks of part-part-time game development can give, these events were simple, especially given that I had maintained my scope fairly well and reduced as many redundancies as I could. The main problem was, alongside the reduced amount of free time to work on the project, the reduced amount of knowledge I had of Godot. 

There are plenty of folders available in my Godot startup, but clicking on any of them gives a 50/50 chance of revealing an impressive albeit simple project that was obviously directly ripped from a step-by-step tutorial, or 3 nodes with half-baked code that doesn't relate to anything else in the project. I was lucky enough to work on The Last Frog and Caller's Fall as part of a team, though my only role was supplying art assets. While this greatly helped me out in some of the art for this project, I had no experience putting together anything from scratch in any engine unless it was being narrated as part of a 7-video series.

So, ultimately, I went into a project underprepared, lazy, and cocky. The final project inevitably turned out to be playable, though nonfunctional (a word which you can't spell without "no fun"). And for this moment, in the relative peace that comes after releasing a project in any state, I'm content with what I've done. I'm sure I'll look back on the code tomorrow and either wonder what in the world I thought I was doing or fail to comprehend how I even concocted some connections and paths together, but I feel much more complacent about my understanding of game coding and game development than when I started. And now, I have some drive to actually put some life into this project. All I need are a few more lines of code. And nodes. And wave functionality. And artwork. And sounds. And a start screen.

...

Sounds like a plan.