As Big Bang Theory greatly sang it, "It all started with a Big Bang", it's that similarity that puts us in our ways, similarly in game development it all starts with planning and having a basic idea of a game. The game I was going to make didn't have a clear idea, but I had just learnt new game development knowledge and was ecstatic to test it out. So, there I went creating a new project called "Idea Stuff", I know not the very brightest name but as it was, it was just the idea, an idea that miniscule by miniscule in amounts got to a point where I had nightmare. So let's start from the beginning, *queue the star wars themed intro with that skewed in y axis text, Somewhere in a galaxy far far away...", so I had developed 2 games which were really basic like reallyyyy basic called "Life or Regret 1.0" and "Life or Regret 2.0", the names really are just self-deprecating humor at this point, but that's what people remember so get on with it. So, the games were just a bunch of 3-4 scenes 2D games
The crappy user interface with buttons with hover and stuff, although at that time, the whole template was made in Canva, except the buttons, the buttons were added later in the game development engine or Godot
Whole Schulkers, the text, the roman's might be able to read it properly but not the present-day people, this basically was a sort of memento - mori speech which I wrote with 2 glasses of Pepsi, so as you read it, it gets very depressing. Here comes the best part, the actual gameplay,
The interesting part is the parallax I tried to create with that npc over there and my main character, you see I wasn't quite equipped with the golden literature of documentation at that time, which is by far the best tutorial or a book of ABC's for any new learners and one pro gamer tip is you should always read one before diving into the code. So, what happens when one doesn't read the documentation is this,
If you carefully see, the player straight up gets a kick from the NPC as it's only a garbage illusion at its finest, not the Penn and Teller of game development at this point but as a result I had to keep the NPC as far as possible from the player and pray no one jumps (I didn't really gave it to anyone, but hey self-confidence) so this was where the I learnt about changing scenes, TEACHING TIME: A scene is when you player switches from one scenery to the next, for assumption in Mario (the really old ones), you needed to press the intended key to enter the castle from the main scene, that main scene is scene 1 and the inside of the castle is scene 2, so that is what changing scene is, the code was really in a preliminary stages to say the least,
So, as for context Area2D is just a radar type node, so when the player enters the area, and presses the desired button, in this case "ui_accept" (that is the enter key), the scene changes, this was the problem, irrespective of the area2d the scene used to change whenever the player or user pressed the key, thus this was re-formed in the later stages of development
As we all know, we all as gamers love to harass the short of NPCs in games, but what if the NPC's harassed you, in my game this was possible which brings me to the next issue, the player-NPC interaction, the interaction was similar and also different to changing scenes, the area2d being almost the apple to beat all doctors but also the CollisionShape2D.
TEACHING TIME: A collision shape or collider is what makes your player interact it the environment of the game, without colliders you'll be clipping almost through the whole environment, trust me it sounds good, but development wise it sounds bad. So, the Area 2D and the Collision Shape is what makes the whole and soul of the game, The NPCs worked on the same desired button scenario as the scenario had the same problem, without entering the area2D if the user pressed the button, the dialogue used to be executed and upon that, if the player pressed the key multiple times, the dialogue used to be repeated multiple times in the background (the second issue is still not fixed, my bad).
This was the script or functions for the NPC, which then was called in the player's script sort of like importing a function,
The code is too convoluted for people new to code, but in Layman's terms, the npcm1 while in range of the player should execute the main dialogue script, predefined as not in its area, however this was later fixed in the second development stages, so pat on my back by me (self-confidence x 100).
These were some minor challenges which were fixed with smaller scripts but at that time, were really big and major, apart from that, what i really enjoyed was designing the levels or just a basic walk-in park type game
This tested the jump function which if you have watched Shaktiman or even Superman, the jump was similar to just takeoff, tweaking some values fixed it but it funny to just see the player taking off from the screen,
A very rudimentary corridor of my college as an engineering student has only 2 places he goes, from home to college and from college to home, whatever happens branches in-between these sources and destinations. So this was a joyful task recreating the corridor and finding assets similar to the college interiors, also the NPC was just to test dialogue which wasnt going great.
But this time, the concept of visibility and arranging of tree nodes in the scene suddenly clicked and worked, by brain's one brain cell sort of woke up from its slumber, the development was made in tiny amounts thus far.
Then suddenly it changes to a top-down RPG, what in the name of Brackeys!! This was when I ran out of ideas as Top-Down game making which still wasn't clear to me and thus made me explore that side of development.
For now, I shall conclude my yapping and stay tuned for the next blogs as you'll see the improvements and a full Top-Down RPG from start to half done (I got a creative block, so didn't complete it). Anyways, stay safe, have fun and game
~Signing Out,
A.B
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