June 12: Making My First Game

You may have noticed that I kind of mostly dissappeared again. Well, I finally started to actually get down and actually learn how to make games. I actually decided to basically skip straight to learning Godot instead of what I was planning before. Basically, I was going to try starting in GDevelop, but their tutorials were extremely barebones to the point of basically being useless for anything other than GDevelop, so I skipped straight into learning Godot.

Honestly, it's gone fairly well so far, though the initial transition was rocky at first. I decided my first practice game would be a simple Breakout clone. I also decided I'd use asset packs (both free and ones from itch.io bundles I got) for the first couple of practice games, that way I don't need to worry about making the graphics, music, or sounds yet. After all, I'm not really planning on releasing the first few games I make, just using them to learn Godot.

Starting out, I was honestly having a bit of trouble for a few reasons. I wanted to follow a tutorial for my first game, and there were only two tutorials for making Breakout-style games in Godot that I could find. The first was for Godot 3.0, so I would often run into a changed function or command and need to look up how you need to do it in Godot 4.0. The second was for 4.0, but did many things in a way that wouldn't work for what I wanted to do (namely, using a function to spawn the bricks, when I wanted my game to be a series of hand-designed levels).

After deciding to give up on both tutorials after putting in everything I would use, development actually started going much more smoothly. As of the time of writing, I have the ball and paddle MOSTLY working (more on this later), all 4 varieties of brick working (1x1, 1x2, diamond, and pentagonal) and brick health and damage, a lives system and game overs, and I just finished the main menu and level select menu.

As for bugs, there's only one I managed to find so far, but it's been plaguing me for basically the whole development of the game so far. The paddle's hitbox is a capsule, and if you "push" the ball on the very edge, the ball starts behaving weirdly and nothing I've tried seemed to fix it completely, only make it harder to pull of. Once it triggers, the ball starts bouncing weird angles or hitting blocks twice before actually bouncing. Hopefully I can figure out a fix for it, but in the meantime it's not too big of a deal. Just need to make sure when testing not to hit the ball on the edge of the paddle.

Other Updates

I'm still going to work on the other parts of the site, but it's probably going to be put on the backburner so I can really focus on learning game development. Still, expect more updates soon-ish, as I'm planning on adding a few more pages, as well as a section for my games when I feel comfortable releasing them.