Last year I made 7 free-to-play video games ranging from interactive text adventures, point-and-click, top-down survival horror, and visual novels.
I’ve been wanting to move away from Ren’Py, a game engine mainly for visual novels, and get comfortable writing GDScript in Godot (game engine). When I made Late Night Surfing, I butted heads with Ren’Py’s innate layering features. You can configure your own additional layers in the engine, but it didn’t always work the way I wanted it to.
My defined layers kept getting hidden by/overwriting the 4 pre-defined layers. The Art Director also wanted the mouth on the TV overlay to move in time with any voice lines and text rolling across the screen. The game engine itself can’t animate per se, but I’m happy with what I coded to give the illusion of a mouth talking.
The first game I’m making this year will be a pixel platformer in Godot. I figured the easiest thing would be to recreate a small game jam game I originally made in Ren’Py in Godot. Last week I started creating the sprites from the VN (visual novel) The Creatures From Below in Aseprite, a paid animated sprite editor and pixel art tool.
The Creatures From Below is a horror game from the point of view of underwater monsters “making new friends” with deep sea oil mining humans. While I’m still playing around with a basic character model, I need to make a tile set to create the environment for the game next. So the tile set will likely be water themed.