2022-02-12

Game design documents and noodling

3:30p

Today is my first official day of my sabbatical, so I'm ready to start jumping into this project in earnest! One awesome note related to "getting started" - I received a really awesome video message by Beefcake the Almighty from GWAR, courtesy of my amazing brother. What a fun surprise, I'm still chuckling. I might need to find a way to work ol' Beefcake into this game somehow (I also have a request to add in Peanut, the World's Ugliest Dog).

4:00p

I'm starting to think a bit about a formal game design document, but I think before I do that I want to whip up one very very very small self-guided test game, to get a sense of what free-form development in Godot feels like, which might help guide me a bit more in terms of what is and isn't possible or realistic goals.

5:30p

Yep, working on a little test game has been helpful. I bootstrapped a simple 2D rect, dropped in a player sprite, and then wired up basic motion and sprite rotation. Once that was good, I set up a very simple "stamina" tracker, based on movement. After moving so much, the stamina meter is depleted, and you must rest sufficiently to recharge enough to activate movement once more. Next: display numeric stamina on HUD. After that: stamina meter?

6:00p

Wow! Turns out adding a stamina meter wasn't a big ask. I was able to use a `TextureProgress` node, and Godot was able to take care of all of the hard parts.

6:30p

One other thing I'm thinking about is project structure - file layout, naming, etc. In particular, I'm still not sure how I should approach state management in Godot. I should probably look at some other projects to get a sense of what others do.

7:00p

Okay, time to call it a day, I feel good about this progress!

© 2025 Matthew Ryan Dillon