The Goal.

Our goal was to further our skills in two things. GODOT and Spine as well as general game development of course.

This build.

This was a final build with a few bugs fixed after the JAM. Most notably allowing the game to be in full screen mode and adding a setting for the ambient sound.

The Linux and MAC builds have not been tested. We will look for feedback and fix things should there be any issues.

GODOT.

We found GODOT a pleasure to work in. We developed in GDScript. It always felt like we were close to the action of the game. Very little framework got in the way as we were building.

I would say the aspects of GODOT I found most useful were.

• The Character2D class is exceptionably useful for building 2D games.
• Building Shaders was effortless and feedback was about as real time as we could hope.
• The UI system is easy to use and understand.
• The Input system was a breeze to implement.
• The animation system is easy easy to use and implement.

What we need to keep at to get the hang of.

• The tile system in GODOT is remarkably powerful but we did not master that at all. It has a lot of features and with that comes a bit of a learning curve. We certainly plan to get our heads around that next time.
• Plugins can require a c build of the editor and runtimes. This is a learning curve worth going through but fortunately Spine does ship the prebuild versions.

I was most blown away by the speed builds are made. Was very easy to drop builds for the team. That was the biggest positive aspect.

All in all GODOT is a fun place to work and we will be exploring it in some future project’s too.

Spine.

We have used Spine before for another project but wanted to improve our animation skills. In GODOT Spine is well integrated. One complaint is the Spin GODOT documentation is sparse leaving us to often experiment.

We still have a lot to learn about using spine so that journey will continue for some time. We got the IK joins working for this project but would still like to explore skins more.

The Game.

We build this in a month for a Metroidvania jam. We wanted the suit to feel heavy and to make the game about managing the power use between combat and jumping and dashing.

We achieved those goals but the result was a some people finding the jumping too slow and sluggish some not being able to master the basic starting jumps even so never really exploring the game very far.

Good feedback for us to learn from but we don’t regret trying something different after all how else can we explore this art.