Post Mortem

This would be my 3rd attempt participating in Devtober, but my 1st success in actually completing and submitting a game for it.

Ningning na Diyosa (Shining Goddess) was originally a project I started last year, built in Unity. The first time was Nagningning na Kapangyarihan (Shining Power) but I felt that the title, even in Filipino, was too long. The original concept for this game was supposed to be my chance to explore mobile gameplay, with learning about Unity’s Proton Engine to add co-op multi-player as well. But life did get busier, balancing day job with other side projects I had. But we can get into the dev stuff.

So, I really did spend at least this October returning back to this game project, with some minor off times due to my schedule.

How I got started: Trello & Google Docs.

I had the google doc file from last year and did some revision to establish what I want to build this time.

I started with what genre game I build, gameplay mechanics to implement, main game loop, lists of assets for music, sfx, and art.

In my New Years Resolution for 2023, I wanted to find a way to be more organized with everything, so I’ve tried out Trello. I checklists by “Code”, “Art”, and “SFX”, Along with setting up different columns for “TODO”, “In-Progress”, and “Done.”

Changing Game Engines: Since the Unity controversy that happened a few months ago from this date, I decided to explore other game engines. I could have gone with Unreal Engine since I built my last game “Maliksi” in it, but I wanted to try another one, plus I felt Unreal Engine is not lightweight, it is a hefty engine. I’d see a lot of hype of Godot so I decided to explore this one. I saw it that it allows for C# & C++, but I thought at least with the access of resources for answers, I’d start off with GDscript, and wow, seeing the language reminded me of Python in a way.

Usually for audio I’d try to always want to practice implementing FMOD or Wwise, but I felt there was not enough resources the implementing into Godot yet, so I decided to not do that for this project.

Since I actually started this game back in Unity last year, I already drew a few of the art assets, made some adjustments and imported them for this new version.

Tala’s 1st version

Tala’s current version

I decided to go with 16-bit version of Tala rather than 32-bit, to keep things a bit simpler.

For the music, I want to get more musicians record for my tracks, especially since the main concept is to have a 3 track playlist that rotates in-game depending on how long the player lasts in their run. But since time was limited, I kept the scope to 1 track, but possibly will add this if I update more on this game.

The SFX was designed with sound synthesis since I started learning Pure Data, a visual scripting language. It’s mainly for me to practice this since I started a course from the School of Video Game Audio on this program.

I would then export these as sound files, adjust them in my DAW (Reaper), mainly to trim the file.

There were still other gameplay implementations I wanted to add to this, such as other attacks, more enemies, point multiplier. Maybe bosses?