Check out Mogura Smash

Fixing bugs

So last time i mentioned that there was a bug. Basically my characters animation was not running in the web build which I had exported.

But for some reason it was working on my machine!

Instead of fixing the issue I spent some time prioritizing finshing up the animations for the walk cycle.

Not really a painstaking process, infact pixel art is quite zen.

That being said the art is still sort of placeholder at the moment. I am trying to kill my inner perfectionist and instead focusing on building something crappy and getting it all out the door, it is practice after all.

So after finishing up the walking animation and writing the code needed to get the correct animation playing I can confidently say that I am able to implement 2d animations in Godot!!!

In the end the bug fix was pretty simple, usually when the feature is broken in prod but not in dev, I make it a point to check the build pipeline. That's where something usually goes wrong in my limited experience and turns out I was right. My github action was using an older version of godot and I needed to update it to the one I was using in my machine.

Primary Gameplay loop

I think I have watched enough devlogs on youtube to know that it is very easy to make good looking visuals for a game, but have nothing interesting in the way of gameplay. That is where the primary gameplay loop comes into picture.

A primary gameplay loop is defined as what the player will be doing moment to moment while playing the game. If you want to distill it down it is meaningful actions and decisions that a player can make when presented with a challenge or scenario such that they are able to make some kind of impact on the playable state getting some feedback or reward and the cycle goes on.

In Super Mario Bros, the primary gameplay loop revolves around moving from left to right and having the option of jumping on top of enemies to take them out of the play space,or dodging them. You have the option of using the powerups as well and they make a meningful impact on how you engage for example if you have a fire flower.

Another example is the 30 seconds of fun from Halo, where the designers made Halo in such a way that they were able to make a series of these 30 seconds of fun into a pretty cool trilogy and prequel.

Yahtzee Crowshaw who is my favorite game critic drilled this into my head, and when I am making up games in my head this is usually where the fantasy of making a game meets the reality of designing a game. I am usually stuck in the process of these elaboirate imaginary games with rich epic stories and when i actually sit down and think about what the player is actually doing I have diddly.

So for my game Mogura Smash I am thinking of something simple like a survivor lite or just a whack a mole thing. It is not going to be the only thing I will be making in the duration of this challenge so it doesn't make sense to put all my eggs in one basket. So just Rip it and Ship It.