Updates

Before the class officially starts, we are taking time to familiarize ourselves with the Godot engine and the basics of game development. My first thoughts on working with GDScript is that it like a blend of Python and TypeScript, which is pretty cool. I'm excited to see how it works in practice. I've also been watching some tutorials on the Godot engine and game development in general to get a feel for the process.

As of now, we have basic character sprites and background tiles ready to go. We are also working getting a basic scene set up in Godot to start testing out movement and interactions. Godot's documentation is very good and has been a great resource for getting started.

Basic Movement

Music

With a fun little open-source webapp called BeepBox, we were able to make some fun 8-bit music for our game.

With the spring semester now in full swing and our team assembled, we are working on getting our MVP (minimum viable product) ready for a demo scheduled at the end of week 2 of the course.

Our big focus is looking at flocking algorithms and boids. This is because one of the unique features of our game is that the player will be able to control a group of monkeys that will follow the player around the map or move independently as a swarm.

Update: Demo MVP is completed. We ended up doing a simple demo level where the player has to use their group of monkeys to deactivate lasers with coordinated button presses and defeat a boss at the end. I'm pretty proud of what we've been able to do some far in only a couple weeks of work, but we also have a lot of work ahead of us as we figure out the rest of our levels, polished up the art, etc.

Some more teasers

Little bit of the MVP demo in action:

Our pretty epic main theme (if I do say so myself):

With the initial demo out of the way, we are now working on fleshing out the rest of the game. This includes creating more levels, adding more mechanics, and polishing up the art and music. While our art was pretty good for the MVP, we really want to dial in the aesthetic of the game to be something truly impressive. Part of this is diving deeper into writing custom shaders and animations to make the game feel more alive.

Another big thing that we realized post-demo is that our initial conception of the game having procedurally generated levels might lead to unintended side effects like the troops getting stuck in walls or not being able to complete a level's required puzzle, so we are going to lean into more curated levels that we can test and refine.

Shaders

Shaders have been another interesting challenge. The largest conceptual change is that the shader coding paradigm is much different than a traditional piece of code. Instead of writing a function that takes in some inputs and returns some outputs, you are writing a function that takes in some inputs and modifies every pixel individually. This is a very different way of thinking about code and has been a fun challenge to wrap my head around. With just a little bit of work, we were able to create a simple VHS monitor-style shader that adds a cool wave effect to the screen when we are doing exposition cutscenes.

For a fantastic introduction to the world of shaders, I highly recommend checking out The Book of Shaders. Additionally, for Godot-specific shader help, the Godot Shaders website has been a great resource for building off the work of others.

Added Animations

Stayed tuned. I don't want to give away a lot but let's just say that we've added some pretty cool animations to the game that make it feel much more alive.

Boids: Revisited

We are making the boids much more interesting by adding targeting behavior to them. Now, when the player is within their field of vision, they will target the player and move towards them. This makes the game feel much more alive and dynamic. The player can hide behind walls to temporarily escape the boids' line sight, but the player has to now fend off the boids while trying to solve puzzles.

2025-02-18 Progress Video