Game 1 - Day 4 The Great Reset.
The Interim
In the past few days I worked on creating a different kind of game. I joined a game jam - Lame Jam 55 on Itch.io. The theme was dreams and I managed to create a game with custom assets and animation where you run from nightmares and try to sleep as long as you can before they all run into you.
I learned a lot while trying to create the game in Unreal - managing to figure out some systems myself to great enjoyment. But then I ran into a major issue when trying to export / package the project.
I first re-realized that Unreal 5 doesn’t have any built in way to export HTML, something that is helpful for itch.io uploads of small games. It was a setback but not the end of the world.
So I shifted to a package build - I’d build a mac version and a windows version.
After some research I realized that even to build a direct mac package I’d need to be a part of the apple developer program. Something I wasn’t at 4am the final night I could upload.
So I shifted to a windows build.
I luckily have a PC with windows so after downloading Unreal, and uploading and downloading my project files I went about trying to build it there.
After fixing some issues from the transfer process I tried the build the game. But every time I tried I had a crash - after a few days of research it turns out to be some core issue with rights of the program to my machine, something I couldn’t figure out in time for the jam. But here’s a video of the game.
Clicker Update
After the nightmare of building the game in unreal - I realized I really should stick to a lightweight editor that I know for the smaller games I plan to build.
I stumbled across a video on the Orchestrator plugin for Godot - which basically creates a blueprint like coding experience for Godot.
I tried to follow a few video tips from years ago to update text using the plugin, but after hours of trying I couldn’t figure it out. I was just about to give out when I reached out on the plugin discord asking for help. The creator (and another admin) told me how to do it (thank you so much) and suddenly the whole world of the plugin opened up to me.
So today was about starting the project from scratch, in Godot using Orchestrator.
To mark the change I even changed my project management tool from Notion to Trello to keep track of my progress and needs to the project.
I started by creating a base scene that updates a label based on floats. Through some trial and error I found that I had to do some funky conversions to get the string to show a rounded integer of the float value.
I made the basic update text into a function so that I can call it whenever I need to update the point value shown.
After some research and complex attempts I learned that Godot has a built in Timer node. I set the node to 1second, added a signal on timer time, and called that in the orchestrator to update the text.
This way every second the text will update (and add the points per second value).
Then I created a process for adding points to the total based on a click amount of a button
So far it works! I even created a custom theme for the button for now.
I’ve started a store so tomorrow I’ll work more on it!
Godot here we Go…Though!
