Black Hole Platform (thoughts on my first project)

Hey, I’m Doc, thanks for reading this. I guess this is a combination dev-log/postmortem? For my next project I plan on doing all this in the proper order.

Making my first “Finished Game”.

For clarities sake and out of respect for people making proper games, let me define this: I wanted to complete something that had a game loop, with an intro and outro, music, sound, animation and UI. So maybe calling this a toy is more accurate? Anyways.

Black Hole Platform was made primarily with a combination of:

• Godot
• Aseprite
• 1BitDragon
• Chiptone

I have a lengthy background in art and have worked on some tabletop stuff in the past. That is to say I wasn’t starting at 0 (if you’re interested there’s more here). Also, I am 145 years old. Also, bad at math.

Design process for a seasoned idiot

I mentioned I have some background in this kind of thing earlier. I leveraged none of that here. Shortly after leaving my full-time job to make video games (more here), I realized I should probably know how to make games if I want that plan to succeed.

So about halfway through making this I came up with that plan: Make a bunch of small games, as tightly scoped as possible, that focus on elements I want to put in my “real game”. Let’s see how that goes lol.

Popping my Godot blueberry

Compared to Gam-Gam, I’m a technological diety that can 3D print web3.0 from “the facebook” while photoshopping block-chain-coin. To anyone born after the 90’s or so, I’m just not dusty with a computer.

I played with Unity and Gamemaker 2 until we beefed. Enrolled, and then dropped out of Odin Project, then met Godot (Actually, a friend of mine that’s an actual developer recommended it to me.). The last one stuck.

About halfway through working on this, things just started clicking with Godot. Signals and Nodes made sense, the Documentation became way easier to surf, and I began problem solving much faster. Full transparency: Godot, along with Co-Pilot as an ELI5 translator made me feel like I had super-powers.

I wouldn’t use AI to write code for me, but only because I know I need to understand what the code means first. But when you don’t know how to phrase a problem for the first time to try and find a solution, AI is pretty good at saving you hours of searching.

The AnimationPlayer node is a beast! Did you know you can call functions and adjust variables in it? Once I figured that out I had to re-think some things to make sure I could properly abuse it.

Overall my experience was humbling in the best way, and educational in a way that watching tutorials just can’t match for my learning style. After getting this done, and already anticipating what I want to do next, my development home is Godot.

Aseprite in the hole!

This cat right here! I mean for pixels and sprite animation? Is there even anything else?!

There is.

So in my old day job, I was using Adobe where I had to. Clip Studio where I could get away with it, and Krita whenever I had the chance. None of these are amazing with sprite animation, but they can do it. I tried my hand at tools like ProMotion and PyxelEdit. The latter I liked too, until I heard the rumors it got ditched.

The tilemap tools and seperating animations by tags are only two features out of a lot, but holy shit do they have some weight to them once you know how to use them. Like intersection erasing in Clip Studio, sometimes that’s all it takes. I’ve got some gripes with the UI in spots, but none of them big enough make me look elsewhere. If I ever work with sprites or tiles, Ase is my Ace.

Chiptone on my shoulder

This is one of the best “Bam” “Zap” “Boom” generators I’ve had the pleasure of using. I’m sure I didn’t tap even half it’s potential, but I will be using it whenever I roll my own sound effects.

Re/1-bitDragon: Born again to destroy your ears in another world

Look I mentioned I’m new at all this right? Did I also mention I have weapons grade Tinnitus? I knew everything I needed to when my DJ friend said this about my tasty jam:

“Heh, it ain’t easy to make good music, but it isn’t super hard to make okayish music”

It’s not 1-bit’s fault. for someone who knows jack about it, this software made it super easy to make music, I just have to get better at not butchering it lol.

Release day

Black Hole Platform got uploaded on March 6th, but I would consider the “launch day” the 12th or 13th. This statement, and the fact that my Kotaku article isn’t up, is probably a good indicator I didn’t think any of that through.

I saw a GDC talk a while back that said something along the lines of:

“If you’re going to take this business seriously, you need to realize you are building fans, not games.”

I’m sure I butchered that. Point is, I agree with the statement. Here’s the thing though: I’m still in the learning phase of all this. I say learning, and not hobby, because the end goal is to produce at least one commercial game by the end of this process. So while this release was lackluster in terms of reach, I’m happy with it. I have something I can show people and say “This is what I was doing in my cave the whole time”.

So what am I walking away with?

Safe to say I’m happy with how this all went down and will be continuing on to the next project in about a week or so, after getting some stuff around the house done. My next project is going to be very different from this one, as I’m making sure to focus each one on different mechanics and play styles to make sure I’m learning as much as possible.

This project did open my eyes to a lot of things though. So in no order, these are the lessons I’m taking with me, or at least concepts this game showed me that I will focus on in the next one:

• When I started this project it was slow, there was a lot of “work on the game for a few days, then walk away for a week”. Now some of that was because of the holidays and transitioning out of full time employment, some of it was burn out, but a large chunk was the lack of accountability. Then me and my friend Cotillion11 started pair programming on Fridays. That was when my focus on this went 10x. We both got to share our projects, give and get feedback, teach and learn. That kind of comradery in the development process is pretty invaluable when you’re in a vacuum, so I’ll be trying to keep that ball rolling into the next one too.
• On the programming end, I will put more work into trying to design things the way the Godot does. I will try to take things like state machines and input handlers and make them nodes with documented classes, exposed in the editor. I would love to have a movement handler node that I could set for top down/side scrolling/mouse move or whatever. My developer friend tells me this is called boot strapping or creating libraries. I can see things in Black Hole Platform that would’ve carried over better, or at all if I would’ve had this mindset from the beginning.
• To facilitate this, I’m going to take the time to finish and scope the design document for the next one. This way I have a better idea of the overall project, and can better plan all the aspects of it. I’ve got some experience with this, and I actually enjoy it, so it’ll be a fun (I’ve technically already started).
• Finally, I’ll be getting on the social train. While I probably made the right call not doing that for this small project, the next one will be closer in scope to a mini game, meaning you should be able to play it for a decent amount of time, or have fun replaying it. Going back to what those better than me have said, I need to start telling people about it, even if that’s pulling teeth for me (I just don’t like pumping myself to other people, always seemed weird). It will also keep me from posting text tower updates since I can break the info down into smaller focused chunks.

Okay well I think I’ll call it here on that note. If you like anything here, or are curious how this whole thing is going to work out for, you can find all my socials on my website, which hopefully isn’t atrocious by the time you get there.