1 Game a Week – Week 4 (Stop Waiting for Godot Game Jam)

This weekend the Stop Waiting for Godot Game Jam is taking place. I was away for most of the week, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn some Godot, make my 1 Game a Week game, and participate in a game jam all at the same time!

So with all of my excitement and ambition, I made a game where you eat your own shit and die.

I regret nothing

Why did I make this, when I could have made anything else? Well first, I tried to implement footsteps. When I tested them, I thought it looked like the slime was shiddin’. Then I thought it would be funny to add a fart sound. Then I realized that the game was basically designing itself. Now this game exists.

What went well

All joking aside, I actually like the game. I actually got to make a fun unique idea (although the idea of “eating” games isn’t original). It’s very simple (which is aligned with the game jam theme to “Keep it Simple”), and it’s kinda fun actually. I think if I wanted to expand the idea I’d like to add powerups like stomach medicine that stops you from shiddin’ for a few seconds. Maybe you could even pick up a bucket that lets you clean the shid from the level? There could even be a spoiled food hazard that makes you shid at twice the rate. But thankfully, I stopped at the game MVP.

What could have gone better

Honestly, a lot could have gone better. If I had a better idea I would have made it. I actually scrapped my first two ideas (a Pong clone and Sokoban clone) because I found implementing them boring, and I hadn’t quite gotten my head around Godot, so the code was a total mess.

This is a lesson I learned while making SPROUT. In a game jam, it’s sometimes worth dropping and restarting if the idea you’re making isn’t panning out. Thankfully the fart noises and the pure concept of this game entertained me, so I was able to find the motivation to finish the game this weekend. Next weekend I’m doing nothing and I’ll have my game finished for Friday 100% definitely.

Also, if I wasn’t making this game for 1 Game a Week, I actually would have given myself Monday to polish it too. But here I am, sticking to my deadlines. So the game definitely could have had more content or polish, but I’m pretty tired of working weekends.

What I learned

I learned a ton! How to make a simple game in Godot being a start, which was the point of the jam. I also feel like I’m starting to re-learn how to write code quickly to prototype mechanics. For a long time I’ve been focused on writing “good code” that takes ages to complete, but now that I’m making games in shorter time frames again I find myself getting used to the idea of making something quick and dirty.

While I’m not a huge fan of GDScript (or dynamic languages in general), I do like how I was able to setup input and movement code with very little difficulty. Also, the fact that Godot has a “move_and_slide” method that handles collisions and sliding against objects for you is absolutely fantastic. I’ll need to get something like that for Unity. I don’t want to spend a week on basic platformer mechanics again…

From a game design perspective, I also feel like I’m learning how important audio and sound is to an experience. This is carrying on from my experience with last week’s game where I played around with audio to make an underwater ambience scene. Adding a fart noise sent me down a path where I had fun and made this. So the context of the game led me down the path to developing these gameplay mechanics, instead of me coming up with the mechanics first.

Summary

I think the main thing I want to take away from this game is that I should give myself more room to make weirder projects. I should just throw shid at the wall and see what sticks. In saying that, I don’t want to make any more shid related games for the time being.

I’m looking forward to next week! I’ll take Monday off, but will give myself 4 days to make my next game. I think I’ll try to be weird with it, and will try to iterate more. I’ll also be back to Unity, so I’ll be in familiar game dev territory.

Thanks a lot for reading my post-mortem on my 1 Game a Week / Stop Waiting for Godot game!

As always, if you want to try out the game, the link is right here: