Hello! This is my first blog post, so I'm quickly gonna introduce myself. I call myself Taevas, and I sometimes do web or game development. I think I'm more skilled in web development, but I find game development to be more enjoyable, it feels less redundant and more creative among other things.

While I do enjoy making games, I haven't really finished any, I run out of steam before I'm able to make something I'm satisfied with, and one reason for that is that I try to make big things and making big things takes a lot of time, effort, and motivation!

So one day, while browsing Lemmy, I found out about this game jam which was gonna start in less than 24 hours, and I just thought "screw it let's try this", cuz a time pressure to deliver a complete game seemed like an excellent way to create motivation! With a time pressure, I can't just work 1h a day and let future me make difficult decisions, when time's ticking, if you think of something, you gotta deal with it immediately, you know?

And so I made a game

But not the game I thought I was gonna make, I aimed to make a sort of puzzle game where your only control is the strength of the gravity using a graphical slider you can interact with with your mouse, and it was gonna make heavy use of the physics engine of Godot, but I realized about 20 hours into it that "the player" could clip through walls, and I never managed to understand why, that issue was very likely my fault and not the engine's fault, but I gave up on any idea that'd involve level borders or walls and the such.

So instead of making something where "the player" would need to get from Point A to Point B by carefully going around obstacles, I made something with the elements I've already created where "the player" would need to reach a lot of Points in space as quickly as possible, without real obstacles! That moment when I had to make that decision definitely was stressful, and interestingly, if I had that new concept from the beginning, the game probably would have been fundamentally different, I probably would've went for something where you move forward in a restricted space (think Space Harrier) instead of… is it what's called 2.5D, 3D environment where you only move in 2D? So yeah, DreamBall, my game, turned out that way due to specific circumstances, but I have no regrets!

DreamBall was made entirely with free and open-source software, on Linux, with Godot as the game engine and LMMS for the "music" and the sound effects. I discovered a bunch of things throughout those 48 hours, and was able to do most of what I wanted, and some things beyond what I anticipated!

One little aspect of it is how the music works: The more velocity "the player" has, the more there are instruments that play. It is a cool concept I've borrowed from Rain World's "threat music" where, the more you're in danger, the more intense the music gets. My music-making capacities are extremely limited, so by making use of this concept, I have a very good excuse to not subject the players to terrible music the entire time they're playing! ("the player" is not supposed to have high enough velocity for the music to play for more than 15 consecutive seconds)

My music-making capacities may be very limited, but my graphics-making abilities are actually even worse, which is the main reason I've went with 3D over 2D. I just can't do graphics, so simple shapes do the tricks! Though in retrospective, using 3D probably allows for more flexibility when it comes to the camera and the environment. It may also add a bit of "wow" factor? Either way, it feels like I wouldn't have any reason to use 2D unless I had assets to work with.

All that to say, those 48 hours were very tiring, but not only did I learn many things, I finally finished making a game I'm satisfied with, especially given the circumstances! Choosing to participate in this game jam was a very good decision.