Aronia: my latest game dev endeavor

Posted by brilokuloj on Nov 12, 2023

You may know I had quit game development for a substantial period of time, despite it being one of my main passions.

It’s hard for me to say what the final straw was, or even if it was a real event or just my depression, but I just grew disillusioned. It felt like a terrible chore with no payoff, and I resented the world of Gamers and Game Reviewers, despite previously being a part of that whole ecosystem.

Well, I’m medicated, and you know what that means!

This is my current progress, after a week or two of on-and-off work. This map is missing vertex lighting but I’ll get there once I’ve made some more progress on the map itself.

And here’s the journey I took to get there!

The first thing that made me know I wanted to get back into game dev was the death of Unity. The second thing was playing a shitload of B3313, a Super Mario 64 romhack.

The third thing was definitely being on medication. They should use me in commercials or something. “Behold: what medication can do for YOU!”

So I (re-)downloaded Godot and got to work. Blanking on a name, I fumbled and named the project folder “Aorn”, imagining that maybe this would be about my character Acorn. I would change my mind pretty much immediately, as if Acorn did have a game it’s already established it would be a Cave Story ripoff, but the vibes are still there and maybe he’ll get a cameo.

I rearranged the letters and added some new ones into Aronia, which sounded like a fantasy location in my mind. I googled it and it’s the genus name for chokeberries. Works for me!

Here is my very first screenshot. I think this is the first time Ned the Flying Head has been in Godot Engine! You might remember him from the time that he tried to kill me.

It wasn’t good enough to just have him on a little empty square. Even when I made the square bigger I couldn’t really tell how fast I was going, with no real depth perception. So I asked some friends to send me their worst images and here’s what we came up with:

The images are a woman begging “you better not be JOYOUS” to a cat with human smiling teeth, the car from that one commercial that has a jumpscare in it, and an image that at first glance appears to be Shrek fucking a bowl of pasta. Classy stuff.

Well, this was handy but it was also fucking ridiculous. I took a crack at making an ACTUAL world, “leveltest”:

This was pretty cool in my head, but in-game the “river” turned into a fucking massive chasm. Scale will continue to be an issue for me. It did give me some feedback about how the physics feel (they feel great), but not much else, so I ended up moving back to the first world - world_of_planes - for most of my testing.

Well, my next concern was making an NPC and getting a dialogue system going. I couldn’t come up with a character on short notice so I used the hairless cat with human teeth and named him Mr. Joyous.

You can even jump on his head! I asked my friends if I should leave this in and they said yes.

I then spent the better portion of a day trying to figure out how to get Godot’s ‘hints’ system to read the list of dialogue IDs from my json file (so that I could pick an associated dialogue from a dropdown instead of having to remember dialogue ID names). Then I felt like an idiot because I don’t think that’s possible. I still don’t know if I want to store dialogue in a json file or make a custom parser or what. SHIT IS HARD! I also asked around about how “professional” games might store dialogue but my friends didn’t really know either. I got so burnt out on this that I still haven’t implemented dialogue yet, heart emoji.

I thought from here it should at least be easy-peasy to finish up the PS1 graphics with affine mapping and vertex snapping…

I’ll let the images speak for themself.

Why. WHY.

I did get vertex snapping, and I think it does a lot for subtlety in animation. I did think I had finally implemented affine mapping, but then it was doing THIS:

fuuuuuuck

More evidence that I’m doing better in life, I think this kind of setback might have previously made me consider eating molten plastic and going to bed really hard. But I’m stronger than that now! I actually maturely accepted that affine mapping is currently outside of my grasp, and maybe someone very smart will come along and tell me why the hell it is doing that, but in the meantime it’s not too much of a heartbreaker to just not have textures that are making you actively seasick.

And, just to wrap it back around:

This is “Bubble Forest”. Yeah, it’s not super deep. There’s TREES and they’ve got BUBBLES on them! But I thought maybe for an early level this would be cute. I’m sure it’ll look better once I bake the vertex colors and get a real skybox in, too.

Bubble Forest actually comes from an ancient idea I had, in maybe 2011, for a runner game where you played as a little raptor. It was ultimately too much like Dino Run and I scrapped it, but I kept the level ideas (including a musical swamp and some sort of… dorito volcano) for my Spyro fangame. Now it’s FINALLY making its way into the 3D world!

Finally, some concept art I drew last night for the main character:

Later in the lifespan of Spyro Fangame I moved from “literally a Spyro sequel” to “a Spyro-like” - a genre that still doesn’t really exist yet, aside from Zera. At that point I knew I had to move away from a dragon protagonist, but I still wanted horizontal travel, so I came up with a bat-fox hybrid (a literal flying fox). I think my original art of this guy was a lot more conventionally cutesy, but I like this a lot more. I don’t remember what my name for this character was, but I think I might transfer the name Rikki onto her.

I do think I’ve set myself up for a bit of trouble by wanting to make a fluffy low-poly character, but we’ll see.

And… there you go. That’s been my last few weeks!

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