Godot Tutorial and Experience

OK, here we go.

I supported (a while ago) the Byte Driver game, and thus Vector Hat development (I hope there's comments open, because I'm doing this a bit off my head) and have been hanging out on the Discord server, and a few weeks ago (I think) there was an announcement there that there was a game jam created doing tutorials.  

So, I have been wanting to do some game development for a while (and this is why the Tutorial Jam was created) and I have wanted to do a game in Godot.  

So, I decided that I would take the time to do that, even though it was in the middle of "NaNoWriMo" or the National Novel Writing Month, which I'd decided that I was participating in.

And, in a lot of ways, that was a bit of a game thing, as I was doing it in Twine, just because that seems a cool way to organize my writing.  

So, as the tutorials that were listed got posted, I saw one on Godot, and thought that was worth taking a look at.

In a few hours, we (plural system) got a working version of the game created, based on how the tutorial was presented.  

At that point, we'd decided that we would give it a break, but felt that probably there were some things to do.  

I have two people who I have ready access to as play testers, so I got one of them to do a bit of a play test, and she liked it quite a bit, and was quite happy with it, but I felt that it was too hard as it was created so started to tweak the difficulty (speed of new "creeps" from spawning).  

Eventually I decided that I wanted to tweak it so that most players would have no problem at all at the beginning, making it really easy, and practically impossible to not get a "decent" minimum score (I think the minimum score you can possibly get is somewhere around 3, and it take a fair amount of effort to get a score that low)

I also decided that I wanted to add levels, and as the levels increase, that the difficulty increases.  

This is where the game currently stands.  

There are some features I want to add:

• Offensive abilities
  • Killing a creep would rapidly increase score
  • Increases in offensive abilities as levels increase
• High Score List
• More variety in invaders
• Instructions
• Settings
  • Music level
  • Effects level
  • Controls
• Instructions

Who knows what else might eventually make it here.  We're open to suggestions.  

But, today I was doing some looking, to wrap things up so I could get it there, and not have to worry that in the next ~24 hours I'd get it there, despite the fact that I should be able to.  

I had both play testers available, so used the other one, and when he was play testing, I could see he couldn't understand how to play, and that I'd made some mistake of not resetting certain values at the end (or maybe the beginning) of the game.  

So, I eventually got him understanding how to play well enough, but because of the problem that I was failing to reset (one) value he was starting to play with 5 minutes of play time as his difficulty level, so I had to fix that.

With that, I tried with the other play tester, and she found that she really enjoyed it.

Also, another thing (before I got the play testing going) I noticed is that the resources which the tutorial included, also included certain ones that we were not using, most notably the two audio clips, one of music, and one a "game over" effect.  

So those also got added.  

I'm reasonably happy, as I didn't have any idea what I would be doing when I signed up for this, except that I probably wanted to do something in Godot.