Hey guys,
A small reason to celebrate for me: today marks the 2 year anniversary for development on the game!
So i want to show you the road i have walked to get to where we are today (waiting for playtest-4 and v0.09 in generral).
TL;DR: Godot is great and you the community are a driving force behind the development.
I have been trying to make an rpg because many of the games back when i started didnt really scratch my itch and i was often discussing with a friend about how our dream-game would look/feel like. So i was cooking up ideas and concepts, wanting to put them to use.
I started out with zero game-programming knowledge. Sure, i was playing and trying to understand the makings of games since my early childhood, but MAKING a game is something completely different.
I have a background in java-programming (4 years of professional experience at that point) but that made me approach certain topics/aspects of my game in a way that was more complicated than necessary.
I tried my hands on different programming-languages with varying results, where i was already happy to get any kind of interactivity going.
I did some tries in Java, but those dont really have any kind of UI going, so its hard to show here.
These games are pure prototypes with no real playable value, more like technical proof of concepts:
First experiment in Angular (typescript):
Just wanted some interaction between 2 Entities in context of the Angular framework with its dynamic fields/displays/labels.
https://www.grinning-games.de/v1/
(dont mind the description of the wolf, this is a reference to an old youtube-video by kitty0706 with some crude humor)
Second experiment in Angular(typescript):
This one has more of an actual ui going on and you can have an automatic battle against a big bad wolf again, but due to big limitation to animations and such back when i tried (maybe also incompetence on my side) i quickly abandoned it.
https://www.grinning-games.de/v2/
Then i dabbled a bit in Unity and made a small flappy bird clone, called floppy birb:
https://www.grinning-games.de/floppy_birb/
But unity felt way too complicated for my purposes and requiring me to adhere to how it should be used, instead of letting me just create something (my personal experience).
I also did try to make a 2d RPG in Unity by modifying the 2D platformer demo, but the way events/signals and Singletons would work, turned me off of it pretty quickly.
So just by chance I found the godot subreddit and engaged a bit with the community and started trying out the game-engine, wielding some real results in a fraction of the time it took me with unity. Because of that i fell in love with godot an kept on going. Here a small video of the prototype i made in it:
Following this i started working on Progress Game starting from 13.04.2019 and published my first playable demo on the godot subreddit and the godot forum:
You can play the previous versions on here as well:
Godot forum
0.07 was then also published on the incremental_games subreddit: Reddit-post progress-game 0.07
Looking at those older versions it becomes evident of how much the game has improved/grown and what kind of central idea is standing behind it. It was and still is far away from what i want to make, but seeing the game grow and seeing the engagement of the community with the game grow over time is something very powerful that often motivates me anew and helps me to grow as a person.
So thanks for everyone who played the game and/or engages with the community and the development of the game. Its all highly appreciated and it helps me in ways that is hard to transport/communicate.
Work on playtest-4 is still going strong and expect some improvements to the general UI and feel.
Making this trip down memory lane, showed me how far i have come and motivates me, as there will be much more ahead of which i dont know about today.
Join us on the discord server if you want to participate in the development, engage with the community or playtest the current playtest-version and get notified when the newest one is ready:
Discord