Decided to dip my toes in game development
This has been something I have wanted to do since I was young. Probably not something unquie to me, especially those that work in the information technology industry. None the less, I finally set aside some time to dive into it. Just like when I started learning programming and web development almost 10 years ago, I feel like a noob. Hosestly though, it has been a breath of fresh air dispite being overwhelmed with all of the new information.
The first step to diving into something like this is choosing what are called a game engine. I am, by no means, an expert in this area but I would define a game engine as this. A Game Engine is a tool that gives you the basic elements that most games have to kick start creating a game. There are several popular ones but some have risen to the top such as Unreal Engine, and Unity. Both amazing and professional tools that many have created successful projects with. I decided to go a different route though. I landed on Godot, mostly because I am a sucker for a good open source project. It has been such a joy working with and their specialized GDScript, which is very python like.
Created a basic clicker game
I was able to fit a few features in this:
- Custom background music using Beepbox.co
- Changing scenes
- Simple UI menus
- Leaderboard that saves to
jsonfile
This was so much fun to make! My family has been having a blast trying to beat eachother as well with the leaderboard to keep track of scores.
Release - Try it out
Here is the relase files. I do not have a machine with windows so have only tested Mac and Linux. Though I did test the .exe build using Steam’s proton tech that is a compatibility layer to run windows software/games on Linux. It worked perfectly using that.
github: github.com/M-erb/godot-clicker-game
MacOS
Due to it not being signed you may need to disable the quarantine after unziping it in the same folder it is in. Otherwise you may get a message like “app may be broken”.
sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine 'WackaGodot.app'
Download: WackaGodot.app
Linux
Download: wackaGodot.x86_64
Windows
Again the app is not signed but I did not look up how to get around it on windows. I did test using proton, Steam’s compatibility tech, on Linux and it worked great.
Download: WackaGodot.exe
