Welcome Back to our recap of what we’ve been doing recently, we’re glad to have you here, we have quite a lot of things to talk about…

Our team has been hard at work to achieve an initial version of the concept we’ve envisioned for the game, and our work is starting to bear some fruit  🙂

After setting up the Github repository for our project, and settling on a final idea (which we described to you on our previous Devlog), we started by developing a basic implementation of synchronous movement, this proved quite easy as we only needed to copy the code for the movement of the first character and adjust some parameters, nothing out of the ordinary.

Then we proceeded to implement one of the key mechanics, the split screen gameplay… This proved quite difficult, as it required deeper knowledge about Godot’s Containers, viewports and camera system, all of which interact in interesting ways with each other. We were successful at last. 

We then headed to itch.io to grab some assets to make our game prettier and once and for all stop using Godot’s face as a general asset (It was even used for the ground 😂). We settled on “Caves of Gallet” by Adam Saltsman for our tile-set, and on “Tiny Heroes” by Free Game Assets for our character sprites.

After some tweaks and adjustments to our jumping physics, we went to the effort of creating an initial map our characters could walk on, (that wasn’t built from a giant Godot’s face), and implementing our character sprites and animations (Even through the use of a shader to invert colours).

We also took time to implement an actual background with parallax scrolling, and labels to identify our characters. Now our game looks more serious and legit. At the same time, double jump was implemented, aiming to improve character mobility.

Next, one of our team members did the important work of adding a main and pause menu so our game could be started and paused, along with the effort to make it actually look good, which is important if we want our game to be a decent project by the time we’re done with it.

Finally, some changes were made to the Shader linked to the appearance of character B, tweaking the colours of said character. Leading to the actual state of our game, where we are now:

This has been all the work we’ve been wanting to share with you, and we’re thankful to you for getting this far, we’re a small team of beginners, and your interest makes all the difference to us. If you have question or suggestions we’re eager to hear them through the comments. 🙂

Things we’ve planned for the future include actually designing some real levels (which is the largest challenge in developing this game), and figuring out how to deal with the synchronization of characters, especially how to act if they get out of sync, or other particular cases.

You can download and try our first prototype build right now from our itch.io page :)

Goodbye and see you next time.