Hey there! It's HJ with Cosmolair.

I'm here to share my thoughts on the development of Luxland Defense (prototype), as well as my first impressions of Godot 4.4 as an avid Unreal Engine 5 user.

I'd recently been getting frustrated with the many things Unreal Engine does as an engine. While it'd been fine for a while making demos and prototypes within it for the past 3 years, I've begun to grow weary with the workflow and optimization process with each new project. It was then that I decided it's high time I learn a different engine. Godot Engine was recommended to me by a friend, who previously proposed moving one of our other projects over to Godot. Given the kind of game that's designed to be, it would only make sense. However, I needed to begin learning to use Godot.

It was hard motivating myself to get to learning Godot, so I decided I'd look for any ongoing game jams. I'd go jam shopping when I saw Jame Gam #47 and what its prompt was. Given it had a reasonable amount of time left by the time I saw it (5 days), and I needed a reason to start using Godot right away, I decided I'd go in.

The prompt was "Rebuild", and the special object was "Horn". Immediately, my mind went to Overlord: Raising Hell. The reason for that was because when I saw "horn", I thought of medieval combatants bellowing their horns to send their troops into battle. So I thought to do a sort of top-down army-management sort of game. The idea was to blow the horn to command your units to liberate towns of invaders and rebuild their homes. Thinking to benefit the player, I intended to add a reward card system the player can draw from to improve their units. If you've played the jam release of this game, you're probably thinking where that mechanic is supposed to be.

Those who know me may also know that I'm a little difficult with game scope. When designing games, I like to look at the overall picture and soldify a game idea in a document first before I go straight in. I like to think it has more pros than cons in my case.

The pros are that it makes it easier for me to pitch the idea to my friends and sell the vision to my collaborators. It also gives me a solid idea for what my goals are in the project and what must be achieved. The cons are that there will always be cut content. I also end up spending more time with planning and doing art. Which is why I'm lucky to have my friend, Hamilton, to help me with not only learning the ropes of Godot, but also helping me with parts of the game that I found myself lacking in. I will admit that I did spend more time on the art than the game itself, as per my nature as an artist. I just can't help but draw anime characters duking it out in a fantasy setting!

As such, it would be up to me for the final 12 hours to get the game from hardly functional to mostly functional. Thanks to Hamilton for setting up some of the foundation, especially for the scene switching and the various systems, I was able to manage finishing the combat sequences and the feeling of them, as well as cleaning up various parts around the game and its UI. I can safely say that I'd stay up for a whole 24 hours leading up to the deadline of the game jam, because I took a fat nap and I'm awake now.

It's not the cleanest work I've done, but I'm proud of the work I've put into this. I learned a lot about Godot. I still have much to learn, and will have to figure out my workflow with Godot more, but I'm confident that I'll be able to continue using this software for future development projects.

I've thought about doing a devlog for this undertaking, and so I did a little bit of recording of the work in progress of the project. However, a whole lot happened in the final two nights and I couldn't really afford many distractions if I wanted to make sure we had a working prototype for the jam. And so I didn't really record anything since I finished the art assets before continuing the programming. Weird, right? Someone doing the art assets mid build, instead of after? I may be a game designer and programmer, but I'm still an artist first. XD