Hold a Candle Devlog #2

Foreword

I'll be discussing my progress from the first week in this Devlog update, so for my progress from the 8th to the 11th. you'll have to look to Devlog 3 when I write that to see week 2's update!

Also, this first week came with a lot of out-of-project stuff for me to dig into, including my birthday :>>>!! So I didn't have time to learn the HTML as well as getting this project off the ground :<<<

With all that said, I think this has been a very promising first week!
I'm going into this project, only having some very very small experiences with touching python in Secondary School, before I abandoned IT, and also some very recent roughly 7-week experience with unreal engine 5 blueprints experience, and I'm using neither of those in this project! So I'm going to detailing how I'll be learning my engines as I go in this project, and my experience with the learning process.

That's right! I said engines! I am actually working on two games for the safe in our world game dev champions challenge! This Devlog will mainly focus on Hold a Candle, because that is the game that I will be solo developing myself, however I will be helping a friend of mine with the programming side of a visual novel made in Ren'py, which my friend will be making all of the real design and directive decisions on, as well as doing the writing and asset production. That is absolutely his game, I will be making very very few creative decisions on it, besides just maybe the odd bit of feedback that will come up as we work together. I will put I link to that game's page [here] when it is created, and when I figure out how to do that!

Hold a Candle, however, is all mine, and is being made in Godot, which I am unsure if I previously mentioned. Since it's all mine, I can fully explore both the learning process and skills that I'm using over the course of this project, and the creative process behind the development of this game. Concept art is a massive passion of mine, and I want to fully dive into that when I do get into the visual communication and asset production of this challenge, and I do intend to post a pretty comprehensive outline of my entire asset production pipeline, from ideation to game-ready assets and the thoughts behind it. (I really need to learn how to add images)

This Week

This week, I set about planning and making the bare bones prototypes of both of the games I will be working on. I started using the project management software Obsidian to make notes on how the engines work, where all the tools are, what some of the important ones I'll be using are, etc. As well as using Obsidian to plan out how I'll be working, what steps I'll be taking when, what my current objectives are. It is taking the role of my project journal and calendar and it is doing a remarkable job of it. As someone who struggles to plan and maintain a schedule and cohesive notes Obsidian has made the early stages of this project very promising for me :>>>

Speaking of making notes on my engines, this went exceptionally well with Ren'py. Ren'py has a comprhensive tutorial built into the software itself, it's framed in a way that clicks with me very well and is very easy to take notes on, it doesn't jump back and forth very much, it covers each topic in rough order of complexity, individually, one-at-a-time. I've only gone through the parts of the tutorial I'd need to construct the scaffolding of the game so far, as in, I know how to build a scene, make all the branching paths and options we'll need, and how to add placeholder images and text that describe roughly where we are in the story without needing the full script. I haven't looked as much into how to create complex transitions and add music and animations yet, as those can come after we have the framework of where the game goes and how it gets there.

Godot has been a little bit harder to make comprehensive notes on within Obsidian. Many of the tutorials on Youtube that are just about "The basics of Godot" end up jumping back and forth on topics and make it very unclear when they're done talking about a certain topic. I understand that Godot is a much more complex, open-ended and interconnected suite of tools, and, as you'll see in my discussion of the prototype, I am getting on well with actually understanding the tools, but I'm finding it hard to phrase it in writing. So if anyone sees this and knows of a good, concise, "beginners guide to Godot" that actually splits up Godot's features in a way that makes it legible, let me know!!

Getting into the prototypes the game I'm making in that two-person team was a very simple, it was basically just a tech demo so I could make sure I was understanding my own notes right, and that I had a good enough idea of what I needed to be able to send a good list of things that i required from my team mate early-on to be able to build the frame-work before we talk about actually populating the game. and that's where work on that ended this week. 

The work on Godot, as I eluded to before, went very very well!! I knew from before the project started that the genre of game I wanted to make for the topic of mental health was a 2D endless runner platformer! It feels like a weird pull, but it was very much a creative and thematic decision. My game's themes cover my own real life experiences with grief and loss. My usual response to hard times is often to isolate myself from the people close to me and dive headfirst into working. It makes me feel like I have value. It makes me feel like I'm doing well. But I've come to learn that this behaviour can be very unhealthy for me, it can hurt me a lot of the time. And somehow, I found that an endless runner would be the best, simplest way of communicating that, in the actual gameplay as well as in the visuals. The inability to stop, the constant, unconscious, unnecessary, unwilling increase in speed, even as the obstacles and challenges become more threatening, until it finally crushes you feels very personal to me. But eventually I do want to make a good ending. I want to find a way for this character to recover, but I want that to take an action that is outside what the game presents as being the only option. I want for the player to be able to slow down and stop in this endless runner. But I don't want it to seem like the obvious answer, I want it to be scary and perhaps even difficult, but it's the only real way of escaping that awful self-destructive run. This is the idea I'm going to pursue and I'm going to detail how I'm pursuing it, in-depth, in this devlog. 

The current progress on Hold a Candle has also been off to a break-neck start in practice as well as in theory!! I have made a fully functional, simple, endless runner prototype, based on a video tutorial called "Godot Endless-Runner Tutorial" by iaknihs on Youtube (which I will link when I know how) This video included how to make the side-scrolling level, a jump and safe collision with the floor, a death upon hitting the side of objects, stopping your upwards momentum when hitting the underside of objects, and most importantly: how to modularly create sections that spawn and despawn in a randomised order, infinitely and seamlessly! And have even done a little bit of stuff on top of that, like create a death barrier! (I will also include a short video or some screenshots of this when I know how) I feel like this is a good amount of progress, or at least a very hopeful amount of progress for week one! because it's like,,, most of the necessary mechanics. But I have Ideas for more, which I will be looking into in week 2!! Wish me luck!!