IWD Gamejam Devlog March 2024

Orbital Dash is my first ever published game and gamejam entry. I have been learning code for about 3 years starting with Scratch and now 1.5 years with Godot learning from video tutorials from contributors such as Griffpatch, Heartbeast, 16bitdev and devworm.

The theme was “illuminate” and I decided to make “light” a valuable tool that is a way to see where you are going and something that you need to progress using energy to jump.

The assets were mostly curated from opengameart.org and itch.io, however I made the torch myself using my limited knowledge of Asperite.

Here are just some parts of the code that I am proud that I could get working, such as the ability to spawn blocks randomly as the character jumps on them:

How I make the transitions using a singleton LevelTransition:

and how I make the players ability to jump tied to the energy level:

I am also proud as this was my first attempt at using fog shaders to add some atmospheric ambience:

There were many issues that I wished I had a solution to that could not be solved:

Enemy not spawning properly – I had intended to have a enemy that would fly around and try to take energy, but when it spawned it would not appear. This was eventually scrapped.

Score not resetting to zero after retry – Basically the score would not reset when the player reset the scene when retrying. To solve this I decided to give the player three tries and attaching the ability to click retry to a variable in LevelTransition singleton. This turned out to be a good feature.

Audio not playing on death scene – I intended to make the player make a sound when they fell too far. Unfortunately the LevelTransition would play and change the scene before the audio had finished playing, so this idea was scrapped.

Settings screen unavailable- for one reason or another I could not get the sliders for the master_bus to communicate with my sliders in the menu. I was however able to get the fullscreen toggle to work.

As this is my first project this is bound to not be the best I’ll ever create, but it’s a start.

I am also still trying to get used to the itch.io interface and this is my forth attempt to post a devlog. I have now decided to write in word first then paste into the page (definite rookie mistake). Also the pictures are having trouble uploading (missing token).