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Currently in ALPHA Stage! A casual and explorative platformer with Captain Holetooth and all his amazing friends. Made by a 40 year old father :)

Post news Report RSS Captain Holetooths Devlog #1

Arr! The firrst entry. What's going on in the Dev Lab?

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Hello all,

Well first of all: I don't have a lab :)
My game is made in my living room on an iMac (ca. 2009) with the open source engine "Godot".
Get used to it... I'm going to promote this engine a lot, because without it my game won't happen :)

The Lab


Progress

This week i have tied all levels together. Phew. That was something.
Creating a reusable "teleporter" through the levels and some nice transitions for cutscenes was something I never did before.

The design stuff is going forward, or does it?

I've totally underestimated the work for tilesets. The existing imagery was pretty simple and that was for a reason.
If you make the tiles look too distinctive and interesting with tiny details, they tend to look even more repetitive because the eye gets distracted - if you design tiles to uniform they look to boring. A hard balance :) I'll tweak this a lot, but at some point I have to stop.

Tile work


Splashscreen WIP


I found out some neat stuff in the Godot Engine which allows me to make a kind of day/night cycle with color modulation. This saves time creating assets.
A demonstration is here on Youtube (I have a playlist there too).

Programming and functionality

In terms of functionality I managed to make the items more varied and random.
I was thinking that the main character only lost one type of candy, but I added more to make the levels look more lively.
I've implemented a score multiplier which rewards and punishes the player for certain behaviour (which is secret... shhh don't look at my source code! Hahaha...)
The scoring mechanism is also more efficient and does not poll for the score all the time - you know it's gotta be 60 frames per second all the time :)

The control mechanics for the ship level are also pretty much done. I'm having more ideas to split up the flying, but that'll come when the Alpha version is out.
It is a lot of fun flying with the ship which is the most important :D

Problems

I'm a font nerd. What boggles me is the fact that many fonts get antialiased (as you can see above), but I want my game pixely.
I will fight some more with the engine to get this to look how I want.

Well, my first post is short and sweet but I hope you enjoyed it a little bit :)
There is more to come in a more concise format and proper planning.

Priorities for this month

  • Build the levels
  • Fix / Remove font smoothing
  • Sprite work, Sprite work, Sprite work, Sprite work, Sprite work, Sprite work...
  • Create better sounds and music

Want to join me?

If you're interested in joining me, you can also look at my company page :)

Arr! I wish you the best!
Oliver

CEO Hirnbix

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