Afterstrife

I made a game!

I had been in need of a creative endeavor for a while and decided on a whim to give this a shot. One weekend I just decided to start drawing some sprite art and fiddling around with Godot.

Aren’t they cute?

This was just some basic inputs and applied transforms on a fixed grid. But quickly developments followed. I did some research on A* navigation and was able to get some real motion implemented.

Sorry about the lack of crop, I got lazy

I’d rewrite this movement implementation 3 or 4 times over the course of development to support the addition of things like targeting, previews and map obstacles. From here things began accelerating as this project completely took over my life. Turn order, combat, win conditions. I redid the sprites and implemented some map obstacles and that all looked something like this.

This was technically playable!

A vision was starting to form for what I wanted this game to be. The initial objective was to recreate Fire Emblem, one of my favorite games. But I wanted to put a spin on it, so I decided to make it PvP, rather than PvE. And as I am wont to do, I wanted the game to have a darker tone.

I can’t stress how obsessed I was with this game around this point in development. I breathed this project for weeks. I was dipping out of conventions and friend hangouts to write a little more code. It felt like my life depended on it. Looking back I probably took it way too seriously but I managed to get a lot done so I can’t really complain.

Around this point I really locked in on the UI of the game. Not only the in game interface but I also made a main menu. Once I started learning Godot’s UI system it was easy just to knock everything out at once. Here is some of those changes.

Apparently I added the third character at some point in there

At about the one month mark, I decided to pivot the game into being my entry for a game jam that was being run by some of my partners friends. It was super casual and the organizer said it was ok if I had been developing my submission for a while. My objective for that month was mostly content, balance, and polish. The core gameplay loop was in place, and most of the functionality required to make the game playable and presentable was coming together.

The playable roster I settled on consisted of four characters. I had two balance characters, a glass cannon and a healer. I had a fifth in the works that I intended to be the tank character who I ended up scrapping because I had trouble distinguishing her from the others at the design stage.

Category 5 blorbo alert

I decided to put some real work into the level design so I added these three maps to serve as the actual end product that would appear in the final game.

I think the in game ui turned out nice

The finishing touch on the game was some writing to add some flair to the game and give it some personality. I decided to add an intro cutscene and some character bios. The cutscene pulled double duty as it helped me retroactively meet the game jam prompt (Necromancer.)

Star described this as very “chuuni”

The game was basically done by this point and I wrapped up the game jam window with some polish and bugfixes. Unfortunately disaster struck last minute and I had a bug regression on the very last commit before submission that slipped under my radar. So the game was in a broken state when I submitted it. I’m pretty sure that only one other person played it at the time so I’m not too worried about it. The far bigger issue was that the bug itself was borderline inexplicable. Characters attacks seemed to deal no damage when executed, but only on the web build. Hence why it slipped past me. The issue seemed to be related to the intersection of the way I structured and loaded the resources that populated the stats for actions. Sadly this remains a mystery because when I finally sat down to debug it months later, the bug disappeared in the process of my attempts to find it. It was like trying to observe a particle waveform. Deadass while drilling down with print statements after implementing a dedicated console for the webassembly build the attacks just started working again. I counted my blessings and updated the itch page.

All in all this project took about 2 months if you don’t count the additional couple months I spent procrastinating the bugfix. I’m quite happy with how it turned out, and while I have some things I’d like to add, I also feel ready to move on to the next thing for now.

If you wanna check it out, please do! And as usual you can find the code on my github.

As a sidenote, I’m trying to sweat these posts less so I actually get them out the door instead of letting my projects go undocumented. So I hope you enjoyed the less formal/polished nature of this post!

Stay safe out there ( • ̀ω•́ )✧