Making a game in Godot: Update 5

Hello again, internet! I intended to write a quick update every month, but I guess I’ve been having so much fun bug fixing and feature creeping that I forgot to provide an update in November. Oh well.

Anyway, what’s been going on? Let’s break it down into bits that I can remember.

An actual Steam page!

It's been up for a while, as the screenshots on my Steam page already look a bit old and out of date - which is good, as that means progress, right? Anyway, please wishlist because it makes me feel good. Thank you so much and so kindly.

Give it a look!

Sound effects!

I’d heard that adding sound effects to your game instantly makes it way more fun - and huh - that’s totally correct. I created a handy SFXManager global and a big ol’ list of sound effect references, and now I can quickly add sounds at various events throughout my game, from UI / user feedback to all the different physics events that can occur in-game. Ok, maybe not all, but I’m working on it.

I’ve snagged some low-cost audio assets during recent sale which I’ve made use of, and also used my mic to record some random voice stuff myself. Fun.

I get that sound effects are probably considered ‘polish’, and I shouldn’t really delve too deeply into that yet, as there’s still critical functionality to improve, but screw it - it’s given me a confidence boost that the game can be quite fun to play.

Googly eyes and vomit!

I did this recently, so I can actually remember it. For reference, a while back, I added a ‘chompy’ mouth hazard to the game, where players’ balls can get chomped (this still feels odd to say), but after adding randomly spawned obstacles (more below) I realised the chompy mouth can actually gobble those up too, causing physics glitches (which are kinda funny, but probably make the gameplay too unpredictable).

To get around this, my chompy mouth now chokes up and spits out any non-player-ball objects it has swallowed up. This works well because:

• It adds a bit of randomisation to stop gameplay from being too static
• I got to record myself making the choking/vomiting noises
• It’s quite funny

Buffs!

From the start, the idea for my Balls game was to create a mixture of skill and some light strategy. i.e., if you’re a more skilful, experienced player, you can still even the odds against your opponent by deploying a well-chosen, well-timed buff card.

This could be adding a points multiplier to your own ball when you’re confident your next shot will do the business, or deploying a physical obstacle for your opponent to deal with.

The balance should be such that skilful players can counter these buffs, either by knocking a points-multiplied ball from a scoring zone, or avoiding a physical obstacle completely.

This buff system is still quite early in development, and will likely be one of the last things to finish as I’ll need to keep thinking up new buffs that people can earn or be gifted randomly... which brings me to...

The gift goose cometh!

To add more variation to a course, there’s a chance a game can be visited by the ‘gift goose’, which will fly over the course and spawn gift eggs. This gives players who collide with a gift egg a weighted, random buff they can choose to apply now, or add to their buff deck for use later.

This should (hopefully) keep courses interesting during replays, and also adds a randomised chance to turn the tides of a game if you happen to be losing badly.

And more!

There are loads of other stuff like refactoring and bug fixes, but there’s way too much to mention, and it's probably boring to read about.

Until next time!