Making a Game #8: Campaign mode, selectable opponents, a million improvements and fixes

Hot dang. It’s been a minute.

I’ve been steadily making progress on my game (I promise), but a whole heck of other things have been going on. Naturally, writing an update got moved to the back of the queue.

That said, I’m starting to feel happy with how the game is shaping up. It’s nowhere near done, but every week it feels like I’m making significant steps forward in terms of ideas, gameplay, bug fixes, and polish.

Opponent selection

Not everyone is blessed with a steady supply of friends, family members or significant others to play against, so most people who play my game will be squaring off against a CPU opponent.

Having one faceless, nameless opponent would be super boring, so I’ve introduced a bunch of them, all with varying degrees of challenge and personality (kinda). It’s a handy way of taking each level and extending its playability - you can take on the worst to the best opponents to keep yourself entertained.

Environmental effects

A recent focus was improving the environments, with the aim of making them more engaging and dynamic. With relatively little effort, I was able to make use of some of Godot’s features to add floating particles, rain, wind sweeps (I had been playing Valheim), and coolest of all, lightning strikes during boss fights.

The latter being not just cool, as it can also physically impact the flow of the game. Having your well-aimed, potentially game-winning ball struck by lightning and blasted off course is a thing.

Speaking of blasts, each course is now (partially) destructible. Explosions leave physical craters on the course, forcing players to adapt or risk being pushed off course. Another relatively small, but massively impactful feature I’m really pleased with.

Campaign mode

Before I started building this game (and, you know, learning how to make 3D games), I aimed to create a single-player, rogue-lite campaign mode, meaning a player would progress through different realms/areas and unlock new places and courses to play - either against the CPU or a human opponent.

Although actually building these areas and courses will be ongoing, I’ve already built a few levels and a boss fight that can be used for an (eventual) playable demo.

The campaign itself will provide ways to earn currency (through gameplay), and that currency can be used to purchase buffs and power-ups to help them through the tougher levels, at least until they master the levels enough not to need them.

Plus, I got to learn more about what Blender can do, and it turns out you can make quite impressive-looking terrain with just weight-paint and shaders.

There’s been so much more, but I can’t be bothered recalling any more of it :D.

Until next time!