I just finished one of the two  games I want to release simultaneously! My very first own, official, pretty much self-made video game. The coding and the visuals were all made by me, for the music I used Free-To-Use pieces and properly credited the artists with links and licence info et cetera. Feels amazing!

yield

I remember when, a long time ago, I wanted a method to delay certain things, and found out about yield (gdscript for the Godot Game Engine, v3.5).  It worked just fine and no one criticized that person's suggestion, it was way later when I noticed a lot of red error messages in the editor and started seeing a lot of "Don't use yield!" on different websites. At that point I had already used an absurd amount of yield in my scripts, the entire game was full of them, and even though they didn't cause crashes, I read that they can/will definitely cause crashes in the exported game, so I spent the last ~2 weeks replacing all of the yields using "Find" in order to locate them all. Aside from that I also had to replace a few "add_child(child)"-functions with "set_deferred("add_child", child)", not all of them, just some caused problems, I don't know why, since I'm not a trained coder, but it all works perfectly now and that's all that matters to me. (I just beat the entire exported game with 0 issues)

The Journey

With barely any coding or art experience and 0 budget, the game definitely took lots of effort and learning. Some people would have certainly been able to create this game way quicker, but looking at my game and considering my little prior knowledge/game development skills, I'm filled with pride and joy. In only about one year I made this game and I'm proud of my achievement, even if some people won't enjoy it. I learned a lot about coding and even though I might not really need that anymore ever again, it was fun, pondering problems, solving them, logical thinking, writing neat code that feels efficient and sophisticated, it can be pretty satisfying, can make one feel smart. Enough is enough though. I might have enjoyed making this game, but at the same time I'm glad it's finally over haha. It was fun while it lasted, but my "coding is fun"-phase is over now and I don't want to spend time with it anymore. And yes, there is the second game I'm making, but that'll be a Visual Novel, I already started with it a long time ago and that's mainly just writing the story, the coding was very easy and nothing compared to the Platformer I just finished.

What's Next?

Next is making a trailer for the game, maybe add a few more screenshots, and finishing the other, second game, the Visual Novel. As mentioned in my profile:

I am currently developing 2 video games, "The Journey Through Mahou", a Visual Novel taking place in a mysterious and magical world, and "The Journey Through Mahou - The Platformer", which, as the name suggests, is the 2D-Platformer version with pretty much the same events, just slighty altered.

I plan to release both games on the same day and hopefully still this year in 2023 before my studies start. The Visual Novel will naturally focus on the story-telling, whereas the 2D-Platformer will explain next to nothing and mainly exist for the platforming. It will also feature different 2 Player-Minigames.

So I have quite a lot of time now to finish it. The only issue is the art, I want it to look really good, and for that I'll need someone to draw the characters and backgrounds for me, that wouldn't be a problem if I had the money for that. I'll have to see how I approach that. Maybe I can gather around 50 or 100 bucks and then hopefully somebody will do it for that money or perhaps even for free. But that's in the future, for now I'm happy with my first finished game. Thanks for reading! 😃👍